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."

Comments

not all good

[AndrewRUK]

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.

BIG Mistake

[NigelJohnstone]

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.

Re:At least sanity still prevails in some places

[osu-neko]

I don't think algorithms are invented any more than mathematical truths are invented, rather they are discovered.

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...