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You did not answer the question.

"So what does the exclusion exclude?"

The EPO answer and practice says "nothing". An EPO technical problem is not about controlling natural forces, but about describing any rule of organisation as technical. To solve that problem you must be a lawyer, not an inventor.

The most inventive lawyer in EPO filing history is perhaps Fritz Teufel, IBM. He was the one that invented the difference between programs for computers and programs for computers as such.

A remarcable invention (since there is no such difference) that has led to a completly new branch of IP-technology.

This technology evolves along what in 1976 was described as "a forbidden path" and will probably soon embrace all logical functionality outside the individual human brain.

If you like that, stay in darkness. If you don't, join your brothers in VOSN or FENIT and sign the petition.

//Erik Josefsson

With a few thousands illegal patents delivered by europe software patent factory, it would be fun to count how many patents this government sponsored software infringes :). Hopefully some German politicians clearly said no to patents. After France, there's hope to get a software patents free Europe if Germany officials say no too.

roff - nroff and groff?

Here's a link saying that dates back to 1969, and it's still widely used.

The prime source of information about software patents in Europe is the patents mailing list on the AFUL web site (french free unix user group).

Some information is also available on the APRIL web site (french association for research in free software).

In particular, to date, all the big (poll-wise) candidates to the french presidential election have expressed their opposition to software patents, see in french Haro sur les brevets and Tous les candidats dans l'opposition.

And of course the EuroLinux web site and FFII web site (Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure ) have links to a lot of ressources and interesting readings.

We, european citizens, are seeking ways to get other european countries take position against the current proposed european law that opens the gates of unrestricted software and ideas patenting.If you're willing to help the cause, please contact your local free software association and try to get some activism in place together with the established assiociations like the FSF Europe. If you are French or German you can even make a tax-deducible donation, it may help the cause too.

--
Laurent Guerby <guerby@acm.org>

See the FFII software patents working group for a large collection of material on patents in Europe. In particular their horror gallery of active European software patents shows that software patents are alive and well in Europe.

See the FFII software patents working group for a large collection of material on patents in Europe. In particular their horror gallery of active European software patents shows that software patents are alive and well in Europe.

On EU software patents - see here from the FFII Swpat Workgroup (as pointed out by the FSF). The situation could soon become worse than the US.

On EU software patents - see here from the FFII Swpat Workgroup (as pointed out by the FSF). The situation could soon become worse than the US.

Have a look at how the EPO has interpreted the existing explicit exclusion of software from patentability. By creative interpretation of the words 'as such' they have managed to turn the meaning of the current Convention through 180 degrees. The policy following the 1997 decision was that 'any computer program with a technical effect is patentable' - and in practice any computer program can be so construed. Then in 2001 the EPO decided that the question of technical effect could itself be skipped, so computer program claims could automatically be granted.

What is needed is not to legalize the existing EPO practice of ignoring the explicit exclusion of software in Article 52(2), but rather to make the EPO's practice conform to what the law says.

We know from past experience that the EPO will take the most pro-patentability interpretation possible of any set of rules. Not allowing software 'as such' to be patented is a meaningless exclusion, since the EPO has already formulated its own definition under which all computer programs are considered to be 'software not as such'.

From their assorted examples, my favorite is a patent on a Method and apparatus for path name format conversion. Filed by Sun Microsystems perhaps as a way to annoy Microsoft, it's a method of converting Windows 95 filenames to Windows NT filenames. These guys crack me up.

From their assorted examples, my favorite is a patent on a Method and apparatus for path name format conversion. Filed by Sun Microsystems perhaps as a way to annoy Microsoft, it's a method of converting Windows 95 filenames to Windows NT filenames. These guys crack me up.

From their assorted examples, my favorite is a patent on a Method and apparatus for path name format conversion. Filed by Sun Microsystems perhaps as a way to annoy Microsoft, it's a method of converting Windows 95 filenames to Windows NT filenames. These guys crack me up.

Think we aren't already fighting this?

Think again! We are fighting!

Since I didn't have the exact details right at the fingertips, I quoted the details from the paragraphs from those two weblinks in my article. I guess even the internet can be wrong! [smile]

Now you get to write a nastygram to the

Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics for errors in a 1993 article,
(my story link was http://www.siam.org/siamnews/mtc/mtc193.htm)

and the European Patent Office for accepting data in a patent that erroneously describes the operation you are so angry about. (My original link here was http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/pikta/txt/ep/0241/081/ desc.html)

Gee, I would have thought them reliable sources of information, but....

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

Agreed.

The technology takes advantadge of the error correcting technology built into every audio CD. This technology is what allows the CD to play well even with hundreds of minor scratches. I think that the error correction will try to compensate for loss of data up to a tenth of a second or something like that. What they do is they put hundreds of minor glitches that are able to be corrected for by the technology. The error correction technology works really well, and is no way even close to being similar to a wave file.

If I recall correctly, compact discs use a version called cross-interleaved Reed-Solomon code, or CIRC. The basic level of error correction provided for Audio CD is one uncorrectable bit out of every 10^9. CD-ROM provides additional protection for data (ECC/EDC ) reducing the error rate to one bit in 10^13 For those interested, there is this detailed description, along with this basic introduction.

The coding system is based on groups of bits--such as bytes--rather than individual 0s and 1s. That feature makes Reed-Solomon codes particularly good at dealing with "bursts" of errors: Six consecutive bit errors, for example, can affect at most two bytes. Thus, even a double-error-correction version of a Reed-Solomon code can provide a comfortable safety factor. Current implementations of Reed-Solomon codes in CD technology are able to cope with error bursts as long as 4000 consecutive bits.

Thus it is possible to put in a couple hundred bytes of junk data every second or that would be the basis of the copy protection, all without compromising audio quality.

That said, I can record any sound playing through my computer with the software I have. The Audio Quality will be very good, then I can burn direct to CD, or convert to MP3, or whatever. Of course, all that I use this for are the music tapes I have from when I used to record certain local bands in clubs professionally.

Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip

The patent is fairly specific in regards to the actual recording process - in that the input stream is encoded to mpeg-1 - I'm not entirely sure, but I doubt VCRs used mpeg-1

You seem correct about the MPEG requirement; Apple, Microsoft, and Real could circumvent the patent by using their proprietary video encodings. From the patent:

providing at least one Input Section, wherein said Input Section converts said specific program to an Moving Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) formatted stream for internal transfer and manipulation;

This covers not only MPEG-1 but also MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 (aka DivX ;-) )standards; infringing this patent requires infringing the patents on MPEG. To infringe a patent, you have to infringe one claim, but to infringe a claim, you must infringe every part of that claim. As all other claims refer back to claim 1 (and the nearly identical claim 32), a fellow could circumvent this patent by using a compression technology other than one created by MPEG, such as the Ogg Tarkin video compression technology that Xiph.org is developing.

And as diakka said, two tuner cards in one box (or even in one household) could by a reasonable stretch of the imagination be considered infringement.

You're referring to the "doctrine of equivalents," which was recently severely narrowed. The patent explicitly names MPEG, and it does not say "or any other media encoding technology."

Not quite right...take a look at European Software Patent Horror Gallery.

Lots of examples of why software patents just doesn't make sense.

Greetings Joergen

Here are two petitions[...]
http://swpat.ffii.org
http://petition.eurolinux.org/

Fortunately, the FFII is linking to Eurolinux instead of starting their own petition.
__

Here are two petitions[...]
http://swpat.ffii.org
http://petition.eurolinux.org/

Fortunately, the FFII is linking to Eurolinux instead of starting their own petition.
__

• http://swpat.ffii.org
• http://petition.eurolinux.org/

You can't do a search for prior art - you'll have to search the entire internet (and more). When searching for prior art, the Patent Office only uses their own database! At least that is what is the practice in Denmark.

Patent's are supposed to give other developers access to your inventions, but have you tried to read a patentdescription? Patents are written in a languange which "only" patent lawyers understand, therefore the average developer will not be able to benefit from the patent databases - they simply don't understand it.

Patents mostly don't benefit the small companies because the big companies often will have a many more patents, which you maybe are using without knowing it. Furthermore big companies has much more money and (probably) better lawyers I would also like to argue about whether a patent on "window display system" would have been good for innovation. What if the World Wide Web, the graphic click-able, interface of the Internet as we know it had been patented? im Berners-Lee who invented it, has said: "If the technology had been proprietary it would never have taken off. The decision to make the web an open system was necessary in order for it to become universal".

For further information, take a look at these links:
The EuroLinux File on Software Patents

Even though software patents mostly isn't possible in Europe, many softwarepatents exists anyway - take a look here and I bet you will be shaking your head: European Software Patent Horror Gallery

SSLUG (Skåne Sjælland Linux User Group) has written a good article here: Software patents - No thanks!

Freepatents.org

Greetings Joergen

It all depends how you make your PDFs. The bulk of the size of a typical PDF is in the images, and the images may be embedded within the PDF in various formats and with various levels of compression. A comparison without detailing what format was used is meaningless.

For example, if you scan a typical one page black and white text document at 300dpi and save the result as a TIFF with CCITT Group 4 compression it will be 20-50kB. If you make a PDF by printing to Postscript then using the PDF generation tool within the GhostScript Viewer you will end up with a PDF that is several MB. That's because embedded within the PDF will be an uncompressed bitmap. If you make the PDF using the c42pdf utility your PDF will be the same size as the TIFF, 20-50kB. That's because embedded within the PDF will be the compressed bitmap.

If you use the Adobe Acrobat tools to produce your PDFs, you will find lots of options for controlling how embedded images are compressed, what the resolution is and what formats are used. You can select different options for B&W, greyscale and colour images.

I suspect the DjVu comparison is not comparing like with like. And in any case, as has been noted, anyone who generates PDFs of documents like annual reports with a scanner is missing the point.

There's also a list of 10.000 granted software patents + some statistics generated from them.

My favorite patent is Visualising a Process: Visualise functions by graphically displaying their components, allowing iterations on the screen and creating a flow chart from these iterations.

I guess that would make Doom for SysAdmins illegal in Europe. America will remain the leader in shotgun based process management!
--

Flash File System

Visualising a Process

Multitasking

Creating dynamic webpages by invoking a script
etc.

Why? Because (quoting the article) "patents can be granted for software that is an integral part of a new machine, if the software -- such as an operating system -- controls the functions of that machine."

... the list of 10.000 granted european software patents. more lists and some statistics can be found here.

Despite what many patent attorneys claim, according the law (Art 52 EPC), computer programs (which are not part of a hardware machine) are not patentable in the European Community (nor India).

However, in Europe courts and the EPO revision boards have frequently yielded to patent applicants desires, so that legal text and patent grant practice and jurisdiction have been in dischord in many EU countries (less so in France or UK, more so in Germany).

The European Commission (as well as the UKPTO, see learned from mickwd's posting) is currently doing a revision of the EU patent law and till 15 Dec 2000, inviting comments on patentability of software.

With legal spirit and practice being divided, the decision may either widen or narrow to the distance to US/AU/JP/ZH (or IN, on the other hand).

If you do have an opinion the road EU should take, please respond to this invitation. You also might consider supporting petition.eurolinux.org or freepatents.org.

• Linux Internationalisation Initiative
• Linux i18n Project, which is at least loosely affiliated with Mandrake since one of their employees is the contact for the project
• Free Mulitilingual Platforms
• Gnome and KDE have also both been actively pursuing internationalization

Nevertheless, there have been incidents like M$ attempt to get the German state Northrhine-Westfalia to exclusively use M$ software in schools (not universities, as far as I know). There is, however, heavy opposition.

Chilli

here is a link to FFII
and the Open Letter it's not too long and a good read.

nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE

here is a link to FFII
and the Open Letter it's not too long and a good read.

nmarshall
#include "standard_disclaimer.h"
R.U. SIRIUS: THE ONLY POSSIBLE RESPONSE