patents

[Peter]

I have been thinking. There is an unpleasant situation where a patent 
office does not research its applications. Then some are granted and 
must be fought in court by the holders of previous art. This can take 10 
years and millions of dollars. So what would be an easy step on the side 
of the defenders to alleviate this (assuming the defenders are not in 
the country where the unresearched grants go through) ?

(This may be stupid): Since the originating country can take 10 years 
and millions of dollars to clear such a lawsuit, it would be reasonable 
that other countries, with lesser resources, would require at least 11 
years and 3 months to research and grant an initial claim of 
infringement coming from that country against judicial persons in their 
jurisdiction. On account of the backlog of cases of course. And of 
course until such a claim would be resognised, any actions pending from 
the original claim of infringement would be blocked or delayed.

ianal (and so glad about not being one),
Peter
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml