Slashdot Mirror
EU Moves Towards Single European Patent Standard
theodp writes "A European Parliament committee Tuesday moved toward setting the first pan-European standard for software patents, but outlawed the U.S. practice of patenting business methods, such as Amazon's one-click Internet shopping. 'The European law sets the right benchmark rather than the looser U.S. system,' said the director of public policy for Europe at the Business Software Alliance, which represents 20 software companies including Microsoft and Apple. Amazon representatives in Brussels declined to comment on the new European legislation."
Unfortunatly, this report, from the Legal Affairs committee, does support software patents, ignoring the advice of the Industry committee, the Culture committee, and the vast majority of the response to their public consultation on the issue. Luckily, there is still time, as it has to pass the European parliament before coming EU law. So, to all European slashdotters, please make sure to contact your MEP about it (in a coherant, non-loony way) and explain why software patents are bad.
...is the software industry leaving the U.S. in droves for less litigious countries.
This is not my sandwich.
Considering that the patent office has turned into a revenue source for the government I'd say it's worse.
Cute how its dressed up, but its telling that its the big players that want to lock themselves in with Patents who are backing this.
We had the most innovative time when there were no patents and lockins. Now the software market is dead, because the OS vendor locks the market down. Giving them more lock down tools in the form of patents is death for applications software.
No applications are developed, nothing new is in the market and it has nothing to do with patents, and everything to do with market lock.
I entirely agree with this, but I'm not sure if this is the right question to be asking. The question is, is there a benefit to the public to award a time-limited monopoly (aka a patent) for those who bother to go out and discover these things, or isn't there one? If it benefits us, we should do it. If not, we shouldn't. Whether it was a process of invention or discovery is moot if we can somehow encourage addition invention or discovery. But I'm skeptical as to whether the benefits are real, or more substantial than the problems that also ensue...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
This is a wide-open door through which even the most rediculously obvious software patents could (and therefore will) slip.
Please please please don't let yourselves think that this is anything other than the EU getting a patent system open to virtually all of the abuses demonstrated in the US.
I just sent the following to my MEP, find your MEP's email address and contact them NOW before it is too late (people in the UK can find their members here)!:
No, we haven't learned from your mistakes, I'm afraid. Before EU started gathering together the directive, some countries, including Finland where I live, had no software patents at all.
I don't think algorithms are invented any more than mathematical truths are invented, rather they are discovered.
Well, every invention is just a 'discovery' in some sense. I mean, take for example child-proof caps for medicine. Someone 'discovered' there was a way to make a cap that wouldn't open unless pushed. Someone 'discovered' that making a tire in a certain shape would pull water off the ground and make driving safer. Someone 'discovered' that you could setup transistors in a certain way to make double data rate DRAM. All of these are discoveries as much as something like realizing that you could delete audio information that would be filtered out by the brain as a way to save space.
The important thing in my mind is to filter out the 'obvious' things from the truly innovative. It's 'obvious' to use base-64 encoding in DNS for international domain names. 1-click shopping is 'obvious', etc.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.