Intellectual Property Law

The end of the European Patent Litigation Agreement?

The IPEG blog quotes patent specialist Jochen Pagenburg on the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA). Pagenburg suggests that, with discussions having been "fruitless" so far, unless there are big movements forward in 2008, discussions on both EPLA and the Community Patent (talks on which EU Commissioner Charlie McCreevy earlier this year described as being "stuck in the mud") might as well be dropped.

The anti software patent lobby will no doubt be pleased with this opinion. At the Open Source Summit event that I attended last month, Red Hat's Jan Wildeboar said that the EPLA was the biggest threat to open source in European because it made "bringing software patents to Europe" more likely.

For other opinions, see:

• The opinion of this firm's IP litigation specialist Ann Critchell-Ward in "a patently good idea!"
• The European Patent Office page on the benefits of EPLA

Full post as published by IMPACT on December 04, 2007 (boomark / email).