Slashdot Mirror
EU Moves Toward Software Patents
edooper writes "Apparently the patent discussion in Europe has taken a turn for the worse. According to the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure: 'This Wednesday, the Irish Presidency managed to secure a qualified majority for a counter-proposal to the software patents directive, with only a few countries - including Belgium and Germany - showing resistance. This proposal discards all limiting amendments from the European Parliament and reinstates the laxist provisions from the Commission, adding direct patentability of data structures and process descriptions as icing on the cake. In a remarkable sign of unity in times of imminent elections, members of the European Parliament from all political groups are condemning this blatant disrespect for democracy in Europe.' Read more: swpat.ffii.org."
My ancestors invented letters, and the point! God must have some patents too ;)
On the plus side, the Europeans on Slashdot won't be able to brag about not having software patents anymore.
Politicans fuck over the electorate. Film at 11.
Beep beep.
Well then I better hurry up and get my paper work together for
The day Google "goes down in protest" is the day tech support gets 1000+ calls per minute about the internet being down.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
Are you sure you aren't a little bit backwards there? The USPTO was only killing American business. All the EU is doing is making sure that America wont be alone in the technological dark ages when the rest of the world has surpassed them technically.
The bit! Ok, I'll only patent the '1', you may write any programs provided the code compiles to some sequence of 0's only....
Maybe it wasn't the babel tower conflict with God that resulted in so many languages but really that they discovered the first language had been patented and they all had to invent thier own.
The next question is, can you patent math? Algorithms really are just math.
Math is pure thought, can you patent pure thought? Patent an idea or a concept?
The idea of God is a product of pure thought (or so I believe). I think you would become imensely rich if you patented the idea of God... Ok, this god thing I think has lots of examples of previous art...
OK, now I'm getting silly, but that's the point, patenting software is silly.