Poland Erases EU's Pro-Software Patent Majority

Algorithm wrangler writes "It looks like there is no longer a majority for software patents in the EU. Yay to our Polish friends - glad you made it in ... Now we can just hope for a bigger push in my own country too (the Danish minister got fried over this issue recently)."

Comments

Re:That clinches it

[Gadzinka]

3.98:1 exchange for Polish zloty to the dollar

Actually, according to Polish Central Bank it's 3.2582/3.2758/3.3240 (sell/mean/buy) today.

US dolar used to be even >4.0 some time ago (2002), but since the beginning of Dubya presidency it's constantly falling. Not that I claim that those two are related ;)

Robert

PS You are welcome, vodka and caviar are cheap here (from 30pln for 1 litre of vodka), women are cute and the "age of consent" is 15 ;)

They admitted it?

[CheetahMk2]

However, at a meeting hosted by the Polish government on the 5th of this month, everyone including representatives of the Polish Patent Office, SUN, Novell, Hewlett-Packard and Microsoft, as well as various patent lawyers, confirmed that the present proposal of the EU Council does make all software potentially patentable.

That's pretty interesting. Poland said that they would not stand for pattenting of business methods, and that's why they were against it - that's the same mess that makes '___ on the web' pattentable here in the US. I think that was a good call on their part.

Also, when in a room with Microsoft & Co., they admitted it WOULD allow pattenting of everything. I think that says something. I only regret that Poland's only issue is the pattentability of code that can "run on an average personal computer", not code in general. As soon as they fix that issue, Poland looks like they will side with it next time around.