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Fraunhofer Institute produced a study for the German Ministry on Economics and Labour:
- Intellectual Property Rights in the Information Society: Their Role for Innovativeness, Competetiveness and the Start Up-Process of Software Companies. A Case Study Based Analysis
Short summary (download page |pdf)
- German long version:
Geistige Eigentumsrechte in der Informationsgesellschaft - Stand: Juni 2003 - Eine Analyse der Rolle gewerblicher Schutzrechte bei Gründung und Markteintritt sowie für die Innovations- und Wettbewerbsfähigkeit von Softwareunternehmen anhand unternehmens- und softwaretypbezogener Fallstudien Mostly german overview page
More From Fraunhofer Institute:
On the conference "New Trends in IPR Policy: The challenge of strategic patenting"(Luxembourg, 3-4 June 2003), Jakob Edler from Fraunhofer Institute gave an presentation:
Extending IPR in software (ppt) looks like a newly made presentation for this conference based on the short summary of the old Fraunhofer study from 2001. Many points on the foils look good, it becomes visible that SME do not have much use for patents and only the big players demand a uniform solution.
Overcall conclusions from the presentation:
- Negative effects on innovation dynamics and variety of software seems to be greater than the benefits
- Long-term costs are expected not only for juridical administration but also from impeding the further development of Open Source ("public good")
- decreasing intensity in competition (number of competitors decreases)
- Result: general technical progress/innovation dynamics potentially hampered (network effects, interactive production etc).
- Broader patentability of software seems not desirable:
- the lower level of protection is no locational disadvantage
- companies oppose US model
- international, strategic use of patents obvious, but concentrated on relatively few large companies.
- Policy challenges:
- Companies wish international harmonisation and legal security and clarity of law
- Supplementary guidelines towards a clearer and more appropriate demarcation on what is patentable and what is not (example: bio-patents): regularly updated and discussed by international experts
- Additional "software" code in patent classification in order to ease search for state of the art and existing patents
- Open Source needs some sort of protection from protection
- Of practical use would be
- administrative simplifications, support (patent information systems, consulting infrastructure etc.)
- knowledge building
- improve own possibilities for utilisation
- deal better with foreign patent systems
On the foils, ISD means: Independent Software Developers:
- Patents as innovation impediments
- Similar patterns in firms of primary and secondary branch :
- 20% have been impeded (ISD: over 60%)
- 5-10% have cancelled an on-going project (ISD: almost 30)
- 10-15% have not stared a project (ISD: 50%)
- IPR disputes:
- 30 % in secondary and 15% in primary branch ever been involved number of lawsuits correlates with external activities (US!) and size German enterprises are very seldom the plaintiffs - ISD claim to be impeded very intensively
- Similar patterns in firms of primary and secondary branch :
Co-operation in software development hampered, especially with competitors
