Una de las circunstancias que animan
la explicación y el estudio del Derecho mercantil es la conexión entre la
realidad y lo que se explica en las aulas universitarias. El reciente litigio
que ha enfrentado en un Tribunal californiano a dos colosos de la informática y
nuevas tecnologías como son Apple y Samsung (resuelto a favor de la primera con
una condena de 800 millones de euros, objeto de apelación), ha llevado a debatir el sistema vigente de patentes.
Probablemente porque este tipo de litigios ni empiezan ni acaban ante los
Tribunales, sino que despiertan también una auténtica batalla de opinión.
Es un asunto importante por implicar a
empresas de dimensión global, por discutirse la titularidad de patentes que
afectan a productos de uso cotidiano por todos nosotros y por la trascendencia
que el debate tiene en términos cuantitativos y estrictamente jurídicos. Esto
último lo digo por el reguero de opiniones que ha dejado el enfrentamiento
entre Apple y Samsung en torno a la finalidad de las patentes y a si se está
produciendo una utilización excesiva del derecho de patente. Discusión que
plantea, entre otros debates, si el sistema legal estaba preparado para su
aplicación en sectores tendentes a registrar una infinidad de invenciones
patentables.
En definitiva, lo que se discute es en
qué medida en relación con determinadas patentes que se debatían en el pleito
en cuestión, se dan esos requisitos generales de patentabilidad que, en el caso
del ordenamiento español, aparecen plasmados en el art. 4.1 de la Ley 11/1986,
de 20 de marzo, de Patentes:
“Artículo 4. Concepto de
patente; inclusiones y exclusiones
1. Son patentables las invenciones
nuevas, que impliquen actividad inventiva y sean susceptibles de
aplicación industrial, aun cuando tengan por objeto un producto que esté
compuesto o que contenga materia biológica, o un procedimiento mediante el cual
se produzca, transforme o utilice materia biológica”.
El reflejo informativo de esta batalla
es inmenso, pero llamaré la atención
sobre dos reportajes recientísimos que me han parecido ilustrativos de la
situación en la que se encuentra el debate. El primero es el que ofrecía el Suplemento
Mercados del Diario El Mundo del pasado domingo 2 de septiembre de 2012 titulado
“Guerra de Patentes” y que se preguntaba, entre otras cuestiones, la de si “¿Se puede patentar todo?”. No menos
interesante y amplia es la cobertura que el 2 de septiembre daba El País a esta
cuestión, al titular “Tanto
patentas, tanto vales”.
Al final lo que se está cuestionando
es la colisión entre dos intereses contrapuestos. Por un lado, la protección
que merece todo inventor. Por otro, en qué medida un recurso excesivo a ese
sistema de tutela por quienes son capaces de estar innovando de manera
constante no puede acabar implicando un freno al desarrollo tecnológico. En
relación con este último argumento, remito a la lectura de la columna que Richard
A. Posner publicada
en The
Atlantic bajo el título: "Why There Are Too
Many Patents in America”. Parte de principios de aquel ordenamiento afines al
nuestro:
“U.S. patent
law confers a monopoly (in the sense of a right to exclude competitors),
generally for 20 years, on an invention that is patented, provided the patent
is valid -- that is, that it is genuinely novel, useful, and not obvious. Patents
are granted by the Patent and Trademark Office and are presumed valid. But
their validity can be challenged in court, normally by way of defense by a
company sued by a patentee for patent infringement.”
Destaca que el
sistema de concesión de patentes no diferencia en atención a sectores de
actividad:
“With some
exceptions, U.S. patent law does not discriminate among types of inventions
or particular industries. This is, or should be, the most controversial
feature of that law. The reason is that the need for patent protection in order
to provide incentives for innovation varies greatly across industries”.
Esa falta de
diferenciación hace que los principios legales que sirven para defender la
innovación en empresas para las que resulta especialmente costosa (caso de las
farmacéuticas), beneficien a otras para las que la invención no acarrea similar
esfuerzo:
“But few
industries resemble pharmaceuticals in the respects that I've just described.
In most, the cost of invention is low; or just being first confers a durable
competitive advantage because consumers associate the inventing company's brand
name with the product itself; or just being first gives the first company in
the market a head start in reducing its costs as it becomes more experienced at
producing and marketing the product; or the product will be superseded soon
anyway, so there's no point to a patent monopoly that will last 20 years; or
some or all of these factors are present. Most industries could get along fine
without patent protection.
I would lay
particular stress on the cost of invention. In an industry in which teams of engineers are
employed on a salaried basis to conduct research on and development of product
improvements, the cost of a specific improvement may be small, and when that is
true it is difficult to make a case for granting a patent. The improvement will
be made anyway, without patent protection, as part of the normal competitive
process in markets where patents are unimportant. It is true that the easier it
is to get a patent, the sooner inventions will be made. But "patent
races" (races, induced by hope of obtaining a patent, to be the first with
a product improvement) can result in excessive resources being devoted to
inventive activity. A patent race is winner take all. The firm that makes an
invention and files for a patent one day before his competitors reaps the
entire profit from the invention, though the benefit to consumers of obtaining
the product a day earlier may be far less than the cost of the accelerated invention
process”.
Y ofrece
algunas soluciones frente al sistema en vigor:
“There are a
variety of measures that could be taken to alleviate the problems I've
described. They include: reducing the patent term for inventors in
industries that do not have the peculiar characteristics of pharmaceuticals
that I described; instituting a system of compulsory licensing of patented
inventions; eliminating court trials including jury trials in patent cases by
expanding the authority and procedures of the Patent and Trademark Office to
make it the trier of patent cases, subject to limited appellate review in the
courts; forbidding patent trolling by requiring the patentee to produce the
patented invention within a specified period, or lose the patent; and (what is
beginning) provide special training for federal judges who volunteer to preside
over patent litigation”.
Entre otras opiniones en respuesta a la
posición de Posner y alineándose con la normativa en vigor y la tutela que
conlleva para el titular de la patente, he encontrado en el blog de la Chicago Law School Faculty la columna del
Profesor Randal C. Picker: "Apple
v. Samsung: What Are Patents Good For?", que sintetiza las tres
críticas más reiteradas hacia la situación actual:
“The charge
is more basic: we have too many patents, as my colleague (and former boss)
Judge Richard Posner argued recently in The Atlantic. (And for a response, see
another of my colleagues, Richard Epstein, in Newsweek.) There are perhaps
three popular flavors of the too-many-patents claim. The first is about
patent thickets and frustrated innovation. Many small patents are granted
and an actual innovative product in the area needs access to all of those
patents. One holdout means no product or, in the alternative, a firm builds a
product knowing that it faces the risk that a claim will emerge later for a
good chunk of the profits. The great danger of these claims of course is that
no one ever shows up to try to share the costs of failed products. The patents
are revealed only after the fact when the product has proven itself in the
marketplace and a large pot of money has been created. Whatever we think of
the patent thicket idea generally, it doesn’t seem to have much bite in Apple
v. Samsung.
The second
version of too-many-patents is a claim about innovation and incremental
incentives. Patents are supposed to induce R&D and we reward
that extra investment with a property right. But if the relevant innovation
would be found anyhow through the normal activities of the firm, the patent
lure isn’t inducing anything and we then are handing out property rights with
all of the corresponding market power harms for nothing.
The third
version of too-many-patents idea is about how innovation is rewarded and is
another version of the incremental incentives claim. Apple has
become the most valuable company on the planet through its innovations. We
might think that carrot enough even without the further benefits of patent
protection for its underlying innovations. Try this: if we had said to Steve
Jobs and Jonathan Ive, “your new designs will create the most valuable firm on
the planet but we won’t give you property rights in them, so other firms will
be able to piggyback on those ideas rapidly, will you still move forward?” I
assume that we think that the answer to that is yes”.
Aparece otro
material para el debate. El diferente perfil de las empresas implicadas con
respecto a la actividad inventiva. Continúo con la cita de Picker:
“In contrast, Apple
is the hardcore vertically integrated firm, inventing, producing and enforcing
its IP rights against another very successful producing firm. We can
undertake to revamp the patent system, and that could be within-patent reforms
about the balance of utility patents and design patents or larger scale reforms
that focus on the incremental incentives question, but given the system we have
today, it isn’t at all surprising that an innovative firm like Apple holds
patents that, by design, make it possible for Apple to block sales by
competitors to eager customers. That is, after all, the point of the patent
system in the first place”.
Un contraste
referido a la otra parte del litigio lo ofrecía la columna “Samsung
se lame las heridas”, incluida en el suplemento Negocios de El País de
ayer.
Madrid, 10 de septiembre de 2012
