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Fergal Daly writes:
On Fri, Feb 11, 2005 at 04:53:13PM +0000, Malcolm Tyrrell wrote:
I presume that these big companies will obtain patents in all territories where patents are available, regardless of where the R&D is performed. Unless they are threatening this merely as revenge (and I would think that there responsibility to their own shareholders precludes this), there would be no more or less reason to do R&D in Europe whether software is patentable there or not. Am I wrong?
As far as I can see you're right and in fact this is a plus for Europe as labs in Europe would be free to use other people's patents during their research whereas in other regions they would have to license them before they could implement them, even for private use,
you know, that's a *very* good point!
This is actually quite a big win for European R&D, too, since it would mean they could develop a technique *similar* to a patented technique, as long as the patented technique was only implemented on software inside their European labs. ha!
- --j.