Carl Maycock

Birmingham

Technical Sales

How will Europe become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge based economy in the world when right from the start the majority of important patents are held by American companies, MS,IBM, HP etc ? Europe had a unique opportunity to avoid the inevitable patent nightmare of cross licensing, unintended patent infringement and a whole host of issues regarding open source. We are now reaching the point where it will be almost impossible to write a section of code that doesn't infringe a patent owned by somebody somewhere. What happens when a European company tries to write code that gives them differentiation just to find out that they either have to pay licensing fees or to abstain completely from releasing that piece of code ? With all the large companies
filing for thousands of patents per year when do we reach saturation point ? How does patent law encourage innovation when it will be almost impossible to write code that doesn't already infringe an existing patent ? The recent Apple IPOD cade is a simple example.