[Discussioni] [Fwd: Re: [Patents] Forgent sues 31 companies over JPEG patent]

[Stefano Maffulli]

Informazione interessante sulla questione 'brevetto JPEG': finché sei
piccolo non ti pesto, ma prova a crescere e ti stronco!  Ma non è
naturale per un'azienda sperare di crescere?  I brevetti software
somigliano a taglieggiamenti belli e buoni.

ciao
stef


-----Forwarded Message-----
From: Sylvain Perchaud <sylvain a XXXX>
To: Brevets <patents a aful.org>
Subject: Re: [Patents] Forgent sues 31 companies over JPEG patent
Date: Sat, 24 Apr 2004 10:32:15 +0200

Le vendredi 23 avril 2004, à 9:35, Jonas Maebe a écrit:

>Hello,
>
>The press release is at:
><http://home.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/index.jsp?
>ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20040422006084&newsLang=en>
>
>There is at least one European company among the defendants: Axis 
>Communications Incorporated (Swedish, http://www.axis.com). More 
>information about Forgent can be found in this article: 
><http://www.macobserver.com/article/2004/04/22.14.shtml>

For info one member company of Europe Shareware asked us to negociate a
JPEG license for them.

After three months of negociations (we received a 40 pages long contract
for the JPEG patent license) they asked us how many copies of the
software are going to be sold each year.
Our member company said 50,000.

Then the discussion broke, they said (by phone, not in a letter) that we
were too small, they didn't want to lose time with us.

They said it doesn't matter, we can still use JPEG without a license.

So we are now in a situation of absolute legal uncertainty : we use JPEG,
we want to buy a license, but the patent owner refuses because we are too
small...
That is not the first time we face such a problem when we want to buy a
patent license. Since the patent lawyers in charge of negociations are
paid a few hundred/thousand of dollars per hour of work, it makes no
sense for them to negociate a license with a small company. Too high
transaction costs.