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This is maybe the point to remind Europeans who haven't done so yet to be vocal about this issue before Sep 22nd, sign the petition, send mails to your MEP. Tell your non-geek friends and family to do so to.

Very interesting. I thought I was up to date, but missed:

a) the latest postponement

b) the interesting contrast between stated vs. actual position of UK Liberals (a relatively significant presence in EuroParl of course)

c) the (surprisingly didactic) UK Labour press release

So I really didn't know what was going on at all!

For further debunking of the McCarthy line, I can certainly recommend the FFII page (probably already referenced).

See
http://swpat.ffii.org/players/us/
a page that gives a small glimpse.

At the recent OECD conference, the US government's representative said that such conferences are useless and the debates of the economists harmful, because the patent system as is is "basically good" and the US will not permit any policy except one that "extends and strengthens" this system. The same representatives have also been doing their best to kill discussions on proper limits of "IP" at WIPO and other UN organisations.

What chances do you think, say, a French company will have suing Microsoft in George Bush's America?

I have been made aware that the european parliament is going to vote on legislation regarding software patents. Here is an excellent FAQ. I understand the vote has been delayed until Sept. 22. My question is will this ruling have any effect on the vote, one way or another? Though I am a shameless Windows user, I have been known to boot into knoppix now and then, and they have stopped development due to this pending legislation. I'd like to know people's thoughts on this and how it effects the future of linux development.

-D

why, pray tell, should such inventions not be worthy of european patent protection?

This has nothing to do with worthiness. The European patent system wasn't designed to make sure innovators are rewarded for their trouble, but to spur the progress of innovation as much as possible. As scientific studies and economists (Google cache, site seems to be down) show, patents do not help innovation in software at all, they actually hamper it.

for a small company, patents are often the ONLY tools they have to keep from being steamrolled by their larger rivals.

This has to be one of the most prevailing misconceptions that pro-swpat people spread. First of all, keep in mind we are currently in the situation where Europe does not have enforceable software patents and has lots of small software development companies, while the US has software patents and mainly huge monoliths. Also, EU software (or other) companies can get software patents in the US and enforce them there at this time without ay problem. Now:

• Situation A, no software patents in Europe (as it is now): Small Company has a great idea, creates a product, sells it. Big Company sees idea, copies it, sells it. Depending on the quality and marketing of Big Company's product and the ability of Small Company to keep innovating and possibly finding a niche market that can sustain its operatrion, Small Company may or may not go broke. No matter what, Small Company can get a software patent in the US and use that to extract money from Big Company in the US.
• Sitation B, software patents in Europe (as proposed): Small Company has a great idea, patents it, creates a product, sells it. Big Company sees idea, copies it, sells it. Small Company sues Big Company for patent infringement. Big Company looks at Small company's product, and sees it infringes on 10 software patents of theirs. The companies settle in a cross-licensing deal, with Small Company possibly paying also an undisclosed amount for usage of the patents from Big Company.

Note that Situation B is not something I just made up, that's how IBM currently behaves in the US. How does introducing software patents in Europe help small European companies defend themselves against big foreign companies, especially since those foreign companies own the majority of the already granted software patents? (75% of the 30,000 already granted ones are in hands of US and Japanese companies)

The only type of small companies that can get easily rich via software patents, are those that do not develop any products. They just patent an idea and then go to big (and possibly also small) companies asking for money, knowing that they can't infringe on any of the other party's patents. This may be an innovative way of making money, but that's not the kind of innovation that the patent system in Europe is supposed to promote.

framing the debate "against" software patents purely on the grounds that the EPO may, in error, issue invalid patents does not, in my opinion, reflect an impressive level of education on the part of EU lobbyists. it rather reflects an astonishing ignornace about today's ecomomic realitities.

Maybe you've seen only that side of the debate, but there are many other sides. When I speak to MEPs, the silly trivial examples of patents granted by the EPO are handy to have, but that's not what the discussion is about. It's mostly about how introducing software patents would not help the European economy at all, how software patents deter innovation and completely undermine the copyright protection that software has (you may think that copyr

Patentability of hardware is a well accepted principal. But what if the hardware contains software? For instance when it's a cellphone. Should the hardware still be patentable?

The European Patent convention explicitly states that computer programs as such are not patentable. This means that adding software to something does not make something suddenly unpatentable. The opponents of software patents are not asking for this to be changed.

What if the phone is only special because of functionality implemented in the software portion? For instance if it can talk to a Jabber server. Should it then be patentable because of the special features?

No, because they're entirely realised in software. Otherwise, since the phone has a built-in processor that's simply executing some code which allows it to talk to a Jabber service, you would just have patented the ability of talking to Jabber services on any kind of computer.

There is no inherent difference between programming a cpu that's inside a cell phone and one that's inside a desktop PC. Yes, you have less memory and speed available, but if that's a criterium, then any kind of software improvement that causes less memory to be used or more computing efficiency would have to be patentable.

Having organised a couple of meetings on the issue in Cambridge, I'm of the opinion that the case that the directive is damaging is overstated.

I don't think so. Have you looked at how http://swpat.ffii.org/players/ibm/#gajn in the US?

The author of the language of the amendments introduced in JURI says that by the nature of the EU system the language can't be very tight, but that a key feature is that patentability can now be reviewed by the courts, and that JURI has made its wishes clear in the Recital,

Absolutely, like saying that a "computer-implemented invention must make a technical contribution in order to be patentable", then correctly deleting article 3 which said

Member States shall ensure that a computer-implemented invention is considered to belong to a field of technology.

and then introducing an amendment to recital 12 which says

Accordingly, even though a computer-implemented invention belongs by virtue of its very nature to a field of technology,

The JURI amendments were full of that kind of silly tricks.

which courts use as a guide to the intention.

The average cost of a court case in the US to get an invalid patent declared invalid, lies between 1 and 2 million USD. Suppose that for some reason in Europe it would even only cost 1/4th of that. What will companies pick when they can choose between a licensing deal of EUR 50,000 or such a lawsuit? I really don't think it's a good argument to say "We must keep the law as unclear as possible and let case law figure everything out."

There is still a crucial issue of how Free and Open Source software authors are protected. The directive is inadequate in this regard, but then the situation as it stands is inadequate. We need to take a social decision that protects authors of Free and Open software because they make the efforts of their labours available without charge and that's to the benefit of society.

The directive is not worse for Free Software than it is for small companies. Neither have the means to obtain the defensive patent portfolio you need to survive in an economical system that allows software patents. Making an exception for Free or Open Source software could actually help monopolies. Microsoft would probably grasp this chance with both hands to crush anyone with an annoying patent they can't get a license for: just release a mediocre product based on that idea that's open source until the other person is squash

I particularly liked her example of a UK company for whom, filing for patents is an excellent idea, lest a US multi-national will just steal the idea and patent it themselves...ahem prior art!

If you don't want to read that much, the bottom line is this: Allvoice managed to squeeze money out of IBM and a division of the then still dying Lernout&Hauspie, with it's patent on an interface between speech recognition software and word processors (allowing you to correct mistakes made by the speech recognition software).

Nice detail those Labour MEPs (read: McCarthy sock puppets, as they're just sending our her standard letter) leave out: both of those lawsuits were filed in the US and won based on US software patents held by Allsoft. They hold similar patents in Europe, but here they aren't enforceable yet (as software patents are still illegal here for the time being). In fact, should we have had software patents in Europe, IBM would probably have countersued faster than you can say "screwed" for infringement on one of the thousands of software patents it owns.

So not having software patents in Europe is a strategic advantage to European companies: as long as they don't sell their software in the US, they can obtain and enforce software patents in US against US companies without fearing to be countersued. I.e., they can play leech in the US...

No it is the SEVENTH time it has been postponed:
EU Software Patent Plans Shelved Amid Massive Demonstrations

The directive has been controversial since its publication on 2002-02-20, and decisions have been delayed already seven times from the initially scheduled vote of 2002-12-16.

This will continue until protesting dies down through constant delays and divide and conquer tactics. It is very hard to win at a game that is never played wheneven the opposition has a chance of losing.

The Free/Libre/Open-Source Software (FLOSS) movement seems to understand this, but many mass-market proprietary software developers are still able to flout this rule. Unfortunately, most computer users have become accustomed to being subservient to their software.

My own experience with most FLOSS has been much like my experience with high-speed Internet service: I can never go back. I think once people get a good taste of what using well-behaved software is like, things will quickly change. The only things that can get in the way of this change are:

• Restrictions on cryptography,
• Software Patents, and
• Other bought legislation

Your joke went over people's heads.

*Cough*

This pretty much covers it for me: Data processing is not a field of technology.

Algorithms are independent of their technological embodiment. Contrast this with, say, the plans for building an automobile. You can't climb into the plans and drive from point A to point B. You have build an actual car. Data can be processed by an algorithm without using a computer. Therefore the algorithm is beyond patentability.

Any reasonable lawyer, not working for one of the sides in this issue, would say that substantial doubt surrounds the enforceability of shrinkwrap licenses in the United States.

• Industrial application: the EPO interprets this as "usable in a way that makes money". Don't believe me? One of the biggest proponents of software patents said so himself in the JURI meeting, when other proponents mentioned they were afraid that this requirement would exclude too many software patents.
• Technical effect: first of all, the "normal physical interaction between a program and the computer" is nowhere defined. Furhter, technical is also nowhere defined (and they don't want to define it, they say it has to follow from case law). In other words, you need anundefined effect apart from something which is not defined, so what could that be? Plenty of things, it turns out (see the heading "When is something technical"). Examples: processing data representing an image, saving memory, increasing speed, using computers instead of humans to process secret/private/sensitive data and automating a known process if the automated process provides surprising speed or economy of scale benefits.

For information on her other claims, please read the the English translation of the letter I sent to most Flemish MEPs, as well as this short overview of why software patents are bad.

Thanks for writing your MEPs, and keep it up!

Also, as others have said, the "closed" sites such as gimp.org are NOT totally inaccessible, they have merely replaced the home page with protest pages with links to the sites' normal pages. Good publicity and hardly onerous!

It should be noted that the "official" day for doing this was the 27th August, and that all the sites I've seen have not shut down, but simply replaced their front page with information on the protest, and then included a link to the original project anyway.

Details of the campaign against software patents can be found at http://swpat.ffii.org/group/todo/index.en.html

It's ironic that slashdot would run a story about linux today at all. But what really surprises me is that Slashdot would continue operation today, even though they allegedly support the Online Demonstration Against Software Patents [ffii.org].

I would urge the /. staff to immediately shut down operations and support the
demonstration, unless they really don't care about open-source software at all.

It's ironic that slashdot would run a story about linux today at all. But what really surprises me is that Slashdot would continue operation today, even though they allegedly support the Online Demonstration Against Software Patents.

I would urge the /. staff to immediately shut down operations and support the
demonstration, unless they really don't care about open-source software at all.

It's August 27th... why isn't Slashdot showing the protest page, huh?

Flingles wrote:

Never even heard of this patent issue. I followed all the links and nothing really told me why I shouldn't like this thingamajig they're doing. So....tell me...what are people protesting against?

Economists decry the proposed directive as bad economic policy. I particularly recommend this lengthy critique which fully explains the situation, complete with many links to economic studies and DOJ testimony.

I have translated the FFII demo page to Swedish.

I also cleaned up the code somewhat and put an XHTML doctype on the page.

I have translated the FFII demo page to Swedish.

I also cleaned up the code somewhat and put an XHTML doctype on the page.

Now, if there's any big spender listening: It's time for action now!

Now, if there's any big spender listening: It's time for action now!

The goatse.cx lawyer said we needed a warning! So.. if you are using a patent encubered operating system like linux or you find this photograph offensive, please don't look at it. Thank you!

[ Stinger, using a patented image format ]

The giver | Feedback | Contrib

Goatse.cx is proudly sponsored by SCO, inc!

With a little bad luck, there will be less: EU and software patents.

So what if it's offtopic :P It still pisses me off.

Patents on software are crap. Help us to prevent European softweare Patents Vote will be Sept 1st in the EU Parliament. Anti-swpat-activists

Who's got the time to write this up and modify their web site? Better if somebody makes up a standard page we can all copy.

How about these example pages?

/. management, please send this article into the main page...

They mention computers, a network, a bar code scanner and printer etc just to give it the air of not being only a business method

Uh-huh. So not only have you failed to read the patent (or, at the very least, failed to understand it), but you also suffer from the delusion that you can somehow read the minds of those who wrote it.

His addition to the state-of-the-art is that this auction is organized using a computer and website. That's all.

Yup. And it was bloody innovative. Sufficiently so that the inventor was granted a patent on the idea.

Remember the old quote? "It takes a special kind of genius to render the previously unheard of blindingly obvious. The cry of 'I could have thought of that!' is especially telling because the fact is, you didn't."

Behold your epic lack of understanding of how patents work. Patents are not broad.

They are specific. That's why they're very long, with lots of fiddly language. You can't read a patent and then generalize it. That's the opposite of the way patents work.

It's the same rhetoric and fake limits they're using in Europe to try to get software and business method patents into the system.

Again, your ability to read minds is shocking.

They mention computers, a network, a bar code scanner and printer etc just to give it the air of not being only a business method

Uh-huh. So not only have you failed to read the patent (or, at the very least, failed to understand it), but you also suffer from the delusion that you can somehow read the minds of those who wrote it.

His addition to the state-of-the-art is that this auction is organized using a computer and website. That's all.

Yup. And it was bloody innovative. Sufficiently so that the inventor was granted a patent on the idea.

Remember the old quote? "It takes a special kind of genius to render the previously unheard of blindingly obvious. The cry of 'I could have thought of that!' is especially telling because the fact is, you didn't."

Behold your epic lack of understanding of how patents work. Patents are not broad.

They are specific. That's why they're very long, with lots of fiddly language. You can't read a patent and then generalize it. That's the opposite of the way patents work.

It's the same rhetoric and fake limits they're using in Europe to try to get software and business method patents into the system.

Again, your ability to read minds is shocking.

Quote from Steve Ballmer: Responding to questions about the opening-up of the .NET framework, Ballmer announced that there would certainly be a "Common Language Runtime Implementation" for Unix, but then explained that this development would be limited to a subset, which was "intended only for academic use". Ballmer rejected speculations about support for free .NET implementationens such as Mono: "We have invested so many millions in .NET, we have so many patents on .NET, which we want to cultivate."

You can find it here

And what about this: .Net patent could stifle standards effort

Patents will never be a problem for Mono? Not sure I believe that...

Why not just use ogg video?

According to this article:

http://swpat.ffii.org/patents/effects/mpeg/index .e n.html

Even Ogg is at risk of being challenged in the courts. Fraunhofer's claims are sort of broad (like all bad e-patents), which means a risk of a lot of court haggling.

Eu-Parlamentarians Search engine.
/*I am not sure but if the EU starts to accept software patents will the US patents be enforceable through WIPO or similar. If so then the EU will already be at a loss as all the US patents will come into force and by typing this I am probably breaking a few of them :)*/

This will be the next step. See FFII swpat AG for comprehensive details or join a Mailinglist patents@Aful.org or bxl@ffii.org

Just a few quotes:

Indeed, for those of you who were here this morning and listened to the people in the software industry talk about how threatening this is to their businesses, as I see it, patents today are often entrenching the established at the expense of allowing the newcomer to come in. I question today whether a Steve Jobs could start an Apple or a Bill Gates could start a Microsoft in view of the web and thicket of patents that is out there.
Joshua Kaplan, Intouch

Oracle Corporation opposes the patentability of software. The Company believes that existing copyright law and available trade secret protections, as opposed to patent law, are better suited to protecting computer software developments.
Oracle 1994

The mind has always been sacrosanct. The claim that intellectual processes and logical procedures (that do not primarily manipulate devices) can be possessed and monopolized extends greed and avarice much too far. Algorithmic intellectual processes must remain unpatentable -- even when represented by binary coding in a computer; even when executed by the successor to the calculator.[..]The company for which I am speaking, Autodesk, holds some number of software patents and has applied for others -- which, of course, remain secret under current U.S. law. However, all are defensive -- an infuriating waste of our technical talent and financial resources, made necessary only by the lawyer's invention of software patents. Autodesk has faced at least 17 baseless patent claims made against it and has spent over a million dollars defending itself, with millions more certain to pour down the bottomless patent pit unless we halt this debacle. Fortunately -- unlike smaller software producers -- we have the financial and technical resources to rebuff such claims.

Jim Warren (Autodesk) 1994

The time and money we spend on patent filings, prosecution, and maintenance, litigation and licensing could be better spent on product development and research leading to more innovation. But we are filing hundreds of patents each year for reasons unrelated to promoting or protecting innovation.
Robert Barr (CISCO) 2002

Please help the Europeans to avoid Arlene McCarthys patent directive legislation. You shall sign the Eurolinux-Petition http://noepatents.org and support FFII http://swpat.ffii.org or other groups http://softwarepatents.co.uk

Talk to your EU representatives and tell them what you think about software patents, what they mean for your business. Stop the sausage machine as MEP Rothley (pro-swPat] denounced parliament legislation.

More information about swpat-legislation in the EU.

Personally, I think the USPTO should:

1. Require patents to be submitted in layman's terms that anyone knowledgeable in the subject can read, rather than in the legalese crap that's commonly used that only serves to obfuscate the issue. Patents should be rejected if they are unreadable - that would ease the burden on the patent office I'm sure.
2. Not let people patent math.
3. Take patents seriously.

Those would help a lot. Public comment would most likely be heavily abused pre-patent, but I think letting people call patents into question and produce prior art in order to contest and invalidate an existing patent should be free - I'd say spend the money on the people to take those requests and investigate them.

MS holds zillions of patents

At the European Patent Office, they hold 446 patents. The complete list is available here.

In Europe, a US based company already has the patent for this "invention". I hope we can use this situation to convince more politicians of the dangers of software patents.

I personally went to the EP for 3 days last week and there really are an incredible amount of MEPs who did not have any idea at all about how bad the current proposal is and who became quite supportive of us after we explained the situation to them. Informing politicians is not the job of the media, but largely of their assistants. Informing the assistants is a job of lobbying groups and individuals.

If you don't contact any politicians or their assistants, you cannot expect them to hear your concerns (although it would be really nice, of course). They vote on about 60 dossiers per week in the EP, so they just don't have the time to go actively looking for information about each and every one of those. Each party has its own specialist for different subjects. The specialists from each faction then create a voting list together, which more often than not is followed blindly by the rest of the faction (since they don't know anything about the dossier).

This is obviously not an ideal situation, since those specialists often have an agenda to push. So informing as many politicians as possible about your point of view is indeed what is necessary. Some will refer you to their local specialist, but most certainly not all of them.

If any patents could be issued on any part of Minix (not possible anymore, I believe, because it has already been published), then this would mean bad times for Linux under the proposed new EU patent legislation.

Actually, France is historically more prone to not complying with the directives. They have also already stated their opposition to software patents.

Of course it happens.
Your are just to blind to see. Check this case in which a german mathematican was stopped from distributing his software by some americn patents...

Help out the http://www.ffii.org/en by direct support or just by donation of money.

Sign the Eurolinux anti patents petition

Write to your member of the European Parliament, emails usually can be found at the homepages of the political parties of your country.

And please don't just do the usual british anti eu rants here, the main proponent of software patents is from britain. Everybody knows whom I'm talking about.

fucking filter. (and, yeah, DOH for not making it a link)

http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/plen0626/index.en.ht ml

One reason this has come up as an issue, is because the US (via the WTO) have been applying pressure to countries around the world to "reform" their IP systems -- to match the US' own system -- for quite a while.

The TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) treaty, and GATT, are the main methods used to do this. The FFII page on the treaty notes 'Article 27 has often been construed by patent lawyers to imply that patent claims must be allowed to extend to computer programs' (my emphasis).

FFII go on to make the case that this can be circumvented BTW; here's hoping, since all of Europe has signed up to TRIPS AFAIK.

Great News
The vote has been postponed until September 1st.
All info at:
http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/plen0626/index.en.ht ml

This means we must have their attention.

Please contact your national FreeSoftware or digital-freedom group to organise an Adopt-an-MEP campaign. If the vote did take place tomorrow, we would lose but with the help of a few concerned citizens, we will win.

Ciaran O'Riordan

I do not think that this is correct. Patents are for inventions. Inventions are for ideas.

I would be interested if you could find even one reference to back up this ideas that you patent "implementations" not "ideas".

Going from an algorithm to a software "implementation" doesn't remove the abstraction, since it's a plain translation from one language to another. So if an algorithm is abstract (which I think everyone agrees on), then so is its translation in software.

After all, why should an idea written in C be patentable in that case, and one in English or some mathematical notation not?

Patents generally are written in English (in America at least). You submit some English and a few diagrams and you get a patent. You would seldom submit C code.

Thanks for setting the story straight.

One thing that would help a lot though, would be if the position statement could be amended to read:

It is this respect that we are supporting the positive revisions proposed in Arlene McCarthy's opinion now being considered by the European Parliament for the granting of patents, and positive amendments proposed by other political groups.

Clearing up this glitch would be useful.

And a physical device is just exploiting the laws of physics that everyone should be free to use.

You cannot patent simply an effect of the laws of physics. You can patent a machine, which will obviously use the laws of physics, but another machine which uses the same effect will not be covered by the patent protecting that first machine. These are not patents on ideas, these are patents on machines or parts of machines.

The goal is to ensure those that find things that were unlikely to have been found anyway are rewarded. Thereby encouraging both their development, and the distribution of that knowledge.

But as a lot of studies have shown, it doesn't work that way with software. Read the introduction and the conclusions of the paper I linked to in my previous post if you want to know why.

The current system is broken. It needs fixing. Things that are obvious are patented, statements of the problem are patented.

Actually, the current system works quite well, thank you. You're confusing things with the situation in the US. Software patents are not allowed in Europe currently. The European patent office is granting them anyway (since more patents granted means more money for them), but they are not enforceable.

But if you eliminate all protection for complex algorithm development then you'll discourage their development. A small company will be unable to deploy a new technique and recoup its investment if large companies can simply reverse engineer the solution and then deploy it on a large scale.

As I said, there is no software patent protection in Europe currently. Nevertheless, the software industry is doing quite well here. In fact, we have mainly small companies here, even though Microsoft, IBM etc are quite well represented here.

And as I said in my previous post: a small company does not get any actual protection from big companies with patents. Read this text about how small companies are "protected" from IBM by having software patents, if you don't agree with the reasoning in my post. So in fact, with software patents, you actually save big companies some time: they don't even have to reverse engineer your code anymore.

Finally, spending time on reverse engineering isn't nearly as efficient as just doing something new from scratch. Extracting an algorithm from compiler-optimised machine code is not something you want to do a lot. And afterwards, you still have to program and debug it again. And once you've done that, you've lost a lot of time that the original coders could use to innovate their product. Once you finally get to market, the technology is probably already outdated... And if you'd somehow manage to directly use the disassembly so you don't have to implement it again, I wouldn't want to be the one having to maintain or improve that software.

Software being disquised as hardware.

Then the patent is on the hardware+software combo as a whole. If you use the same software for something else, the patent is not enforceable.

Research being financed exclusively by large companies that knew they could afford to bring the resulting products to market themselves.

On the contrary, if there are no software patents, a small company can develop a program without fears that its investment will be voided when it finally goes to market, because some big company may suddenly appear and tell them they violate such and such patent (even though it may be a very innovative program for the rest). With software patents, only a big company is guaranteed to be able to force a cross-licensing deal for the programs it writes.

The research that was developed being kept as trade secrets.

This is the only positive side I can see, to b

Open Forum Europe got stitched up.

The patent directive is far from a done deal, as the success of last week's lobbying in Brussels shows.

The important point, that the journalist didn't realise, was that Mike Banahan was not talking about a consultation run by the European Commission or the European Parliament, but about a *consultation run by a firm of lobbyists* who had been hired by a consortium of big business associations. (Remember that OFE's response was paraded not by the Commission, but by this consortium of associations).

So the real story is

Lobbyists for big business [*not* the European Commission or the European Parliament] are determined to introduce software patents in Europe despite widespread opposition from European companies and software developers, according to a UK open-source software lobbying group.

The subsequent paragraphs take on a completely different dimension when you realise they are about the lobbying firm for the business associations, not the European institutions:

Mike Banahan, chief technology officer with OpenForum Europe, a subsidiary of technology lobbyist InterForum, said the group received clear indications during a consultation on the proposal that some form of software patenting would be introduced, regardless of the fact that the consultation showed heated opposition to such patents.

"We were briefed that a position that was in total opposition to patents would be discarded, that that was not a position they were prepared to take," Banahan said. "The position was, given that there will be software patents, what kind will there be? It was presented as a done deal."

OpenForum had not intended to submit a position paper on software patents, as it focuses on end user adoption of open-source software, but the group's opinion was solicited by the organisers of the consultation, Banahan said. The paper was misinterpreted in the press as supporting software patents, he added.

The quotes are echoed in this posting to the FSF Europe-UK list:

He stated (as off the record as he could get in a public forum) his statement on software patents was written from the point of view of - IF software patents were a done deal (and he was informed that they pretty much were, by the people asking him for a statement) then there should be exclusions for Free Software to safeguard the common interests.

He also said (again as completely off-the-record as possible) that he had been told that any anti-patent statement would be discarded, as many others had already.

The parliament vote is now expected in the first week of September. The Socialist group in particular is very divided. But internal party-group positions are expected to take shape this week, while the MEPs are all gathered together in Strasbourg, before they disperse for the long summer recess. It is therefore worth contacting MEPs now, sooner rather than later, to have maximum effect.

Contact details for UK MEPs can be found by clicking on the map here

(This information sent to ZDnet on Thursday night, but apparently not of interest).