EU Parliament Approves Software Patents

AnteTempore writes "The voting has just ended. Few good and several bad amendments were accepted. The directive proposal was accepted: 361 for, 135 against, 28 abstentions. The precise numbers and results for each amendment will be available on europarl.eu.int tomorrow." Reader swentel submits this report on the vote (French) with slightly different numbers (364 voting yes, 153 No, 33 abstaining) but just as bad. Watch this story for updates. Update: 09/24 15:44 GMT by T : Dr.Seltsam writes to say that the early reports are "not quite correct. The German publisher Heise states in this article, that the vote concerned strong changes on the directive." In particular, "pure software patents will not be allowed." Google's translation engine does a decent job with the German.

Comments

Re:Bleh.

[Moraelin]

In software, most ideas are obvious

So says someone who likely never invented anything at all. Ever. Just made a living out of wholesale copying of other people's algorithms.

Do you even understand cryptography, for example? At all? Would you be able to invent a brand new encryption algorithm, overnight? One that actually works and is secure, I mean, not snake oil. Only _then_ are you entitled to bad mouth an encryption patent as "obvious idea."

Or since the GIF patent is the most maligned... Can you invent a brand new lossless compression algorithm over night? No, really. _That_ would make you qualified to judge it as "obvious idea."

It took, what? Over 3 decades of computing to come up with the LZW algorithm? If it's that obvious, how come all the "patents are bad" whiners didn't come up with a better one? No, PNG isn't a new compression algorithm. It just used another existing algoritm.

So you haven't ever invented anything. All your life you just copied algorithms wholesale from books and whatnot. And argue that you should be freely allowed to copy other people's inventions. And god forbid that you ever have to pay the original author anything for his work. Well, gee... Why am I not surprised?

No, really. I can also imagine how someone would like to produce pharmaceuticals without having to invest in research. Just get a few test tubes and start producing the exact same stuff that those big corporations produce.

Only in that kind of a plagiarists' world, what's the incentive to invest in research? Why bother paying big bucks to research something new, if then any unskilled monkey can come and copy it? Yes, that's your ideal world. A world where everyone just copies existing stuff, and new stuff appears maybe once or twice a century.