cdmagurus.com
09-26-2013, 08:40 AM
The creation of a pan-European patent system will help spread abusive patent litigation to Europe and could lead to E.U.-wide sales bans on products, leading tech vendors have claimed.
Tech giants including Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Cisco, HP, Yahoo, Intel and BlackBerry sent an open letter (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/799542-upc-industry-open-letter.html) to European officials on Thursday outlining their concerns about the-formation of a new unified patent court system in the E.U.
While the unified system has been heralded as simplifying the patchwork of rules that currently exist across the single European market, vendors say it also brings the threat of a one-stop-shop for quick region-wide sales bans. And allowing cases to be split up, with the validity of a patent decided in one court while infringement issues are decided in another, can expose product vendors to penalties even before the patent in question is declared sound, they claim.
The proposed rules of the new system could favor the practices of Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs), popularly known as patent trolls, the companies wrote. PAEs are individuals and firms that own patents but do not directly produce goods or services using the patented innovations and instead assert their intellectual property rights against companies that do.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here (http://cdmagurus.com/article/2049520/patent-trolls-will-gain-from-a-single-european-system-vendors-warn.html#jump)
More... (http://www.pcworld.com/article/2049520/patent-trolls-will-gain-from-a-single-european-system-vendors-warn.html#tk.rss_all)
Tech giants including Apple, Google, Samsung, Microsoft, Cisco, HP, Yahoo, Intel and BlackBerry sent an open letter (https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/799542-upc-industry-open-letter.html) to European officials on Thursday outlining their concerns about the-formation of a new unified patent court system in the E.U.
While the unified system has been heralded as simplifying the patchwork of rules that currently exist across the single European market, vendors say it also brings the threat of a one-stop-shop for quick region-wide sales bans. And allowing cases to be split up, with the validity of a patent decided in one court while infringement issues are decided in another, can expose product vendors to penalties even before the patent in question is declared sound, they claim.
The proposed rules of the new system could favor the practices of Patent Assertion Entities (PAEs), popularly known as patent trolls, the companies wrote. PAEs are individuals and firms that own patents but do not directly produce goods or services using the patented innovations and instead assert their intellectual property rights against companies that do.
To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here (http://cdmagurus.com/article/2049520/patent-trolls-will-gain-from-a-single-european-system-vendors-warn.html#jump)
More... (http://www.pcworld.com/article/2049520/patent-trolls-will-gain-from-a-single-european-system-vendors-warn.html#tk.rss_all)