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)."

Comments

Re:Patents

[ciaran_o_riordan]

> to clarify: I ment "what exactly could be patented?"

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-pate nts.ht ml
or
http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallman-mec -india.h tml

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