Patents

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It is commonplace that patents represent an absolute right giving the owner thereof a potential to effectively create, if so desired, a monopoly by asking a Court to grantinjunctive relief. This potential to get injunctive relief belongs to the crown jewels of the present patent system of our days. It enables patent holders to create and maintain vertically organised economic structures governed basically by the principles of command and control: The entity holding the patent decides (and, with the aid of the Court system, enforces) as to whether or not and, if, by whom and under which conditions, the subject-matter of the patent claims may be worked in real life. For many of the IP people of the day, any politically motivated attempt to weaken the provision of injunctive relief in patent law would create perceptions next to an emasculation.

Microsoft Corp. yesterday has filed a patent infringement action against TomTom NV and Tom Tom, Inc.:

"Microsoft has filed an action [...] in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington and in the International Trade Commission (ITC), against TomTom NV and TomTom Inc. for infringement of Microsoft patents. We have taken this action after attempting for more than a year to engage in licensing discussions with TomTom."

TomTom is a manufacturer of navigation devices. See also this report on Heise Newsticker [Sorry, in German only]. They also provide a list of U.S. patent numbers involved in that case (I haven't checked that!). The case has been filed in the U.S. on the basis of U.S. patents and U.S. law.

However, surely this case might perhaps cause some discussion on the effects of patents on computer-implemented inventions; the Heise report says that the TomTom devices in question are basically based on some flavour of Linux (I haven't checked that!). What would happen if such court action were mooted in Europe?

Here is the result of a brief patent family analysis in order to check out any potentiual diffrerences between the U.S. theatre and a hypothetical European theatre:

U.S. Patent	EP Patent
6,175,789	EP000001376882B1 EP000000804351B1		Vehicle computer system with open platform architecture
7,054,745	N/A		Method and system for generating driving directions
6,704,032	N/A		Methods and arrangements for interacting with controllable objects within a graphical user interface environment using various input mechanisms
7,117,286	N/A		Portable computing device-integrated appliance
6,202,008	EP000001376882B1 EP000000804351B1		Vehicle computer system with wireless internet connectivity
5,579,517	EP000000618540B1		Common name space for long and short filenames
5,758,352	EP000000618540B1		Common name space for long and short filenames
6,256,642	EP000000557736B1		Method and system for file system management using a flash-erasable, programmable, read-only memory

It certainly would be welcome if any political debate of the wider implications of this case would concentrate on the language of the claims as granted, not as applied for, in the different jurisdictions, ad surely not on the wording of the abstract.

Probably the case is not about Linux as long as something like a standard kernel is considered. Building a navigation system on top of a Linux kernel is quite another matter, I suppose. The FAT-related patent ("Common name space for long and short filenames") is, however, a known issue. But, as far as I know, patent EP000000618540B1 has been declared invalid with regatd to its German part in 2007 due to lack of inventive step.