Policy suggestions

We come to the following policy suggestions based on the analysis given in this paper:

1. The European Patent Office should require that patent applications mention all prior art (not only from the patent literature but especially from sources outside the patent literature) that is known to the applicants. In practice, disclosure or even awareness of prior art is avoided for legal reasons (see the discussion on ``Chinese walls'' in Section 3). This is an undesirable situation since it undermines one of the primary roles of the patenting system: acting as a knowledge dissemination mechanism.

2. A public effort should be launched to scrutinize (``garbage collect'') the European patent data base and look for trivial software patents. Such a public validation phase should become part of the patent application procedure.

3. The sources on which prior art searches are based should be extended in the case of software patents; in particular web-sites, mailing lists, and software source code should be permitted as sources of prior art.

4. Governments should make major investments in designing patent-based curricula for software engineering and computer science as well as in retraining programs for professional software engineers.

5. Governments should require that all software development that takes places in projects they fund follow the patent-aware software life cycle. Otherwise, governments may become vulnerable for infringement claims.

6. Rejected trivial software patents are a tool for establishing prior art. The EU should launch collaborative efforts to collect and categorize prior art in software engineering. This will lead to a defense against software patents from outside the EU and it will also advance the level of knowledge and technology to effectively handle patent information.

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