France To Launch a National Patent Troll 179
zoobab writes "France is creating a state sponsored patent fund, FranceBrevets, which primary focus will be to sponsor, acquire and license patents in the ICT (read software patents) sector. The patent fund is at the initiative of the minister of Research, Valérie Pécresse, the Ministry of Industry, Energy and digital economy, Eric Besson. The primary target of the fund is to collect licenses on those patents, which is already seen in France as the biggest patent troll of the country. France is also supporting the European Unitary Patent, which is seen by many at the final attempt to validate software patents in Europe."
Patents will be the next 'bubble'. (Score:4, Interesting)
Easy to create in the thousands, being nothing more than a sheet of paper and can be sold for billions.
France is getting onboard early to dampen austerity measures from the last bubble.
Welcome to 1984 (Score:5, Interesting)
Animal farm wants their president back. As a French national this makes me question my nationality. Between three strikes patents and this I wonder whether France truly got rid of the Nazis? Sad thing is there are so many other 'first world' nations that are also following this trend of returning to medevial times.
Not as bad as it sounds (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course on Slashdot patents=bad ; and of course as well no one is going to read the Fine Article, particularly if it is in french. The google "translation" and the various interpretations in english people have put out are not helping. Nowhere in the article is it written that this institution will massively collect stupid patents for little money and sue companies like Microsoft.
First you have to admit that patents have at least on principle some validity. Someone has an idea for a commercial new product, describes it in a patent and get some limited protection. It is totally unfair of large company to read such patents and implement the idea at a lower cost without paying licenses.
The idea here is to allow small-to-medium companies to benefit from patents as well. While a small company can certainly file for patent, they do not have the resources to defend them in court or otherwise, so basically they are more or less moot, except as bargaining chips for acquisition. The French government puts out a lot of money (think NSF-like grants but also industrialization grants) and they are not seeing as many industrial success as hoped. One reason, they reason, is that small companies cannot defend their ideas against larger companies, both in Europe and overseas. Other nations have government-based patent protection. Do you think the CSIRO patents for 802.11a/g [engadget.com] were trolling?
So this institution will help small-to-medium French companies defend their portfolio. The initial idea is no to collect patents but to propose services. Indeed they will put together defensible cases by polling patents in some cases, but the stated aim is to get licenses income for the companies, not for this new institution by itself. This is not the same as trolling I think.
Essentially the French government doesn't want to see its industrialization monies get wasted too much. What's bad about this ?