[Fsfe-ie] My comments on ENNs story of patents restart

[Fergal Daly]

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,

Fergal