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

looser?

[bluelan]

Typo - make that loser system.

Re:At least sanity still prevails in some places

[56ker]

Q. Now, the question is how do we get the U.S. government to adopt this standard?

A. Lobby your politicians

Q. Will it be like the Metric system, where we are
too entrenched to switch to a better system?

A. Nope, converting to metric is easier - however the software to do it is patented. ;o)

Looser?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know I can't be the only one who first read that as the loser U.S. system!

Re:1.0 is never perfect

[jafac]

that's not true at all.
While in general, newer software versions lead to improvements, there are many examples out there of points in the evolution of an application where it just took a bad turn somewhere, and never found it's way back.

Sure, there are new features, which, when compared to the competition, are MUST HAVES, but when compared to the old software, which just plain does what you needed it to do and did it well.

Software gets bloated with undesirable crap, often at the behest of Marketers, Lawyers, and Accountants, rather than Engineers.
So when you have LAWS written by Industry Lobbyists and the politicians who answer to them, (instead of politicians who answer to their voting constinuency), of COURSE you'll get unwanted feature-creep.