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National law trumps local law

National law trumps local law

Posted Feb 25, 2009 10:55 UTC (Wed) by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
In reply to: Not likely to be a problem with patents by jmorris42
Parent article: The trouble with OpenBTS

Typically local and regional government are prohibited from overriding certain broad classes of national or trans-national law. In the case of national law this is enforced by the national government's own courts and police. So if rural Alaska decides to ignore the patent rights granted to "intellectual property owners" by the US congress, the Federal government is able to enforce those rights anyway, in extremis by sending armed Federal agents to confiscate the base station hardware.

As far as I know though there is no /international/ law of patents, so in places which either don't recognise patents nationally, or are outside any legitimate national territory (which might include Antarctica) it could be legal to ignore the patents.

Of course any nation or other sovereign entity can simply reject patents, or savagely reduce their force, but if years of arguing by economists, law makers and Free Software evangelists haven't convinced a country to do that, I hardly think that a free GSM cell for a small village or research station will make the difference.


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