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From Legal Wordings to Economic Reality
Holger Blasum writes "The directive on software patents in
Europe is (currently) scheduled in the European
Parliament mid June, so the
7-8 May parliament hearing on
Software Patents: from legal wordings
to economic reality might be a good
opportunity to make your views heard in
Brussels. There is some support for accomodation, and hitchhikers or taxistop might ease getting there. If you cannot attend, find (and invite) your EU representative
here (hint: this database does not include so many email addresses, so it would not be wise to go for this in the very last minute; if the options overwhelm you try the "Legal affairs committee", and/or the persons you are likely to vote for in the 2004 elections)."
No no, when state and corp combine, it's called fascism, and the US has had it most of the 20th.
MSFT is American. IBM is American. Oracle is American. Americans have had years of experience developing patented SW technology. The only pieces of SW that I can think of that is European is SAP and MP3. If Europeans decided to adopt SW patents, the US would eat you guys alive! They would send all their lawyers to Europe and patent everything and your mother. Not because we are smarter, but because we have much more experience in thinking of how to patent things.
I'm an American, and since I know how much you Europeans despise us, I think the best wake-up call for you guys is to remind you that SW patents will completely and utterly favor us Americans. How the hell could Europeans trust US technology, especially after things like Echelon being used to provide business intelligence against European bids?
The only way to do it is to keep Europe SW Patent free and allow Linux to develop unfettered, including using American patented SW technology freely. Right now, the only way that Europe will ever get an edge over the US is through Linux. European govenments don't have to worry about any backdoors in Windows, they don't have to worry about paying extra fees, or being held hostage by the patent developed by US companies. Call your representative and stop this insidious process of patentizing Europe. The way it's going now, with all this patent tyranny that is going on the in the US, the only safe haven for Linux is in Europe, if and only if they keep patents out of Europe.
> to clarify: I ment "what exactly could be patented?"
e nts.ht mlc -india.h tml
Whole applications won't be patentable, algorithms will.
This sucks because M$ could patent the algorithim used to write a certain file format. Then we wouldn't be allowed to reverse engineer, say, MS Word Docs.
This makes their monopoly much tougher. For a great read, try:
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/stallman-pat
or
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-me
Stallman gives a very clear explanation of the history, stupidity, uselessness, and problems of software patents. (he's really an excellent speaker & writer.)
Ciaran O'Riordan
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
True.
However, you forget all the embedded software that companies like Infineon, Philips and ST Microelectronics put in their ICs. A lot of this is patented as well and might even work against e.g. MZFT.
Furthermore, a European Software Patent Directive is nice, but for most countries, patents are issued via the European Patent Office (EPO). This Office grants some software stuff, but has more than once made very clear they definitely will refuse anything that does not have any tech stuff in it. This kind of applications doesn't even get searched. It happens, I have seen it more than once.
And when an examiner makes a mistake, you can always file an opposition, in which you can actively fight the patent before the EPO (instead of the passive re-examination before the USPTO).
Furthermore, the EPO is not bound by EU legislation. I do remember a previous discussion that this was wrong, but in this case, it might be a good thing to free software. (ok, there are some 'buts')
As a sidestep, please think about the following question: why should something that is patentable when you implement it with hardware, not be patentable/ protected when implemented in software?