What we need is protection *from* other people asserting "IP rights", rather then protection *of* our "own" rights. Small businesses don't want to get involved in litigation; they want peace of mind that they won't be sued.

Europe requires strong silly walks property rights to protect its innovative strolling, meandering and goose-stepping and remain competitive in the global silly walks marketplace!

Having created the exclusive right of people to their silly walks, the problem of infringement needs to be addressed. Look around you, everywhere people goosestepping without the German market getting a penny! How much do the irish get when people do the drunken stumble? Nothing! Not one euro cent! Who would invent new, innovative silly walks if anyone can just copy them?

It's important that I use rhetoric like this so you don't look at the detail of what I'm proposing, which is to make Europe bogged down paying to walk everywhere, while the rest of the world can walk for free. So perhaps some sort of exclusive Rhetoric right? Europe should keep it's lead in rhetoric too!

Our future success depends on creating arbitrary rights in private companies, devoid of any cost benefit, then taxing everyone with unnecessary overhead paying for these rights. History has taught us that the more bureaucratic and expensive a country is, the more successful it is in the world marketplace!

That why's we're kicking the Chinese butts with our goosestepping pointy boots!

Yours,

McCreevy.

... why don't terrorists blow them up?

Technology moves faster than patents. If you patent your inventions, someone else will be selling something better by the time you are ready to spend hundreds of thousands on one defence of one patent. If instead you put the money into research, version 2 of your product would crush your competition far more quickly than patents.

Patents work best for companies that do not have any products to be threatened with counter claims. Remember, you can patent anything at all - no matter how old or obvious. Such patents are technically invalid but they still have plenty of nuisance value.

A useful patent would say something nasty about Muhammad (صلى الله عليه وسلم) (hope I spelled that right) or the Qur’an (if there was a way to make the backlash hit the EPO when they publish the patent).

I thought 'we' typically referred to intellectual property, not industrial property in this context. Is this just bad translation, or is this just another case of individual's rights being usurped by big business.