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Agreed. Parliament can grant pardons. They should come out and say, "Anyone prosecuted for patent infringement over this valve will be pardoned." There aren't
by tyre 7y ago
Agreed. Parliament can grant pardons. They should come out and say, "Anyone prosecuted for patent infringement over this valve will be pardoned."
There aren't many clear, easy choices in a situation like this.
Here's one.
- hedora 7y agoThey can probably also move to invalidate the patent. There is precedent for this sort of thing in the US, at least.
- manmal 7y agoIANAL but I‘m not sure it would work this way since parliament cannot directly influence the judge. And I think this wouldn’t be a criminal case, so they would have to change patent laws (might take too long now), or find a different way - eg they could promise to fully reimburse all infringers of this patent though.
- regularfry 7y agoThat's actually the wrong way round. In order to be pardoned, they first have to be found guilty, so they need to go through the expense of defending themselves. What's needed is to prevent the cases from getting that far in the first place, which could be done by the government taking possession of any relevant patents for the duration and issuing a time-limited license.