Business Software Alliance Writes European Regulations?

Holger Blasum writes: "The European Commission's proposal for a directive on software patents making software patentable in Europe is announced today (the commission's proposal still will have to pass council and parliament). MSWord's "Author" field suggests that it comes straight from the BSA's director of public policy. See the Eurolinux press release for a brief summary, more details can be found at the FFII website. Or, if you prefer French, zdnet.fr has some coverage too." The EC's site has several webpages about the proposal: a main page, FAQ, and the official copy of the proposal. Comparing the proposal-as-released with the draft obtained by Eurolinux, many sections are identical, some sections are nearly identical and a few sections have been completely rewritten.

Comments

Darn Europeans

[tiltowait]

I live in the USA, where corporate interests hold no sway over our politicans. Clean up your act, Eurpoe!

Evil idea for messing with the BSA

[PeterClark]

Someone has probably come up with this before, but submitted for your approval: The Taunt. The Taunt works like this. According to the BSA's tip page (http://www.bsa.org/usa/press/newsreleases//2000-1 1-14.350.phtml), you should watch out for the following signs for pirated software:

• If a price for a software product seems too good to be true, it probably is
  
• Be wary of software products that come without any documentation or manuals
  
• Beware of products that do not look genuine, such as those with hand-written labels
  
• Watch out for products labeled as academic, OEM, NFR or CDR
  
• Beware of sellers offering to make "back-up" copies
  
• Be wary of compilations of software titles from different publishers on a single disk
  
• Check with organizations such as the BSA should you become a victim of software fraud
  

Now, I don't know about you, but I find a lot of this stuff in my desk drawer. Why, several people have made copies of cdroms crammed full of various programs and offered it to me for only the price of a blank CD!

The astute reader will have already caught my drift by now and realized that with Linux and the GPL (and all the other OSI licenses) you don't ever have to say sorry to the BSA. So why not taunt them? Report yourself today!

Actually, before someone jumps up and says something, let me point out that I don't think that reporting yourself to the BSA is really a good idea. It's like walking up to a 300 pound thug and saying something nasty about his mama. But we can dream, can't we?

:Peter

Somebody Patent Spam Please!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

then sue all the spammers...

Re:What was there before?

[AftanGustur]

Anyone who is in Europe now have some insight?

Well, I live in France, I don't know of that counts. Since we have no software patents nobody is doing any research and development.
We do our calculations on ABACUS systems (you know with sliding balls). We also have no modern telephones, televisions, VCR or the latest cars, since all those require software to work.
You should know how hard it is to read /. with a Abacus.

We are all wishing we were living in America, the land of the free (and brave).