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EU Parliament to Vote on New Patent Rules

peter_sd writes "The Register has an article discussing the implications to the open source community and small software businesses of the new software patent law to be voted on tomorrow by the EU parliament. According to the article, it is very likely the new patent law will be accepted despite its grave consequences."

5 of 252 comments (clear)

  1. Vote postponed, time to get organised by ciaran_o_riordan · · Score: 5, Informative

    Great News
    The vote has been postponed until September 1st.
    All info at:
    http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/plen0626/index.en.ht ml

    This means we must have their attention.

    Please contact your national FreeSoftware or digital-freedom group to organise an Adopt-an-MEP campaign. If the vote did take place tomorrow, we would lose but with the help of a few concerned citizens, we will win.

    Ciaran O'Riordan

  2. Petition by zmooc · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you don't like this - which you should:P, please sign this petition.

    --
    0x or or snor perron?!
  3. It exists: Prior Art DataBase by ciaran_o_riordan · · Score: 4, Informative

    Some people are already working on this, please work with them:

    http://www.nongnu.org/padb/

    Development of the database is being worked on at:
    http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/padb/
    and the software used is Free Software, available at:
    http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/topas/

    Lobbying EU MEPs is still the best thing we can do right now, people from any country can do this. I gave an example for what an American can do in a later post:
    http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=69331&threshol d=0&commentsort=0&tid=155&tid=99&mode=thread&pid=6 327875#6328000

    Ciaran O'Riordan

  4. Re:Good for them by infolib · · Score: 4, Informative

    intellectual property and patents are two fundamentally different things.

    No. "Intellectual property" is used generally about exclusive rights to information in some form. See for instance the annex to the EU directive proposal on IP enforcement. It mentions copyright, trademarks, biopatents, denominations of geographical origin, semiconductor topography etc. Oh well, perhaps it's used differently in the US.

    --
    Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
  5. Vote was postponed to September by Balaitous · · Score: 5, Informative

    It is known since Thursday 26 June that the vote will not occur on 30 June. Despite pressure from the pro-patent UK labour rapporteur Arlene McCarthy, the conference of group presidents in the Parliament has decided that the vote in plenary will occur only in September.
    A little more time to convince Members of the European Parliament of all parties of the the common sense decision: rejecting patents for software ideas and information processing methods.