EU Parliament Demands Fresh Start for Patent Directive

ravenII writes "Members of the European Parliament from countries including Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden have asked for the software patent directive to be redone from scratch, according to a report on Monday."

Comments

Patent machinery

[Lindsay Lohan]

Members of the European Parliament from countries including Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden have asked for the software patent directive to be redone from scratch

The patent directive is ill-advised because it unnecessarily broadens the area that could be governed by patents. It's not even just about software patents. Patents on ideas are wrong, whether in software or in business. You should patent some concrete machinery, not a way of doing things.

Re:Patent machinery

[Znork]

If you dont have the resources for a prototype you wont have the resources to file for a patent, and you _definitely_ wont have the resources to enforce it, nor defend yourself against countersuits.

Of course, in the case of software, if you have a GREAT idea for some REVOLUTIONARY program, you'll get sued for violating several hundred different patents, losing the savings and venture capital you'd managed to scrape up, and driven to living on the streets in personal bankrupcy before you've finished your first thousand lines of code.

Personally I'd rather have the legal right to invent without getting sued than the right to sue without inventing.

Re:Patent machinery

[Qzukk]

Wasn't the purpose of patents to allow us little guys to profit from a good idea without having to risk our future on it?

From where I stand, its not doing that. Not even close. I'm working with a startup, and we thought about patenting our software, and the first thing we did was run into someone else who has patented something similar (the only difference is that their patent calls for two databases to do what we can do with one database and logic). Having spent more than it would have cost to file a patent ourselves on a lawyer, search, and the reactive scramble, we decided it wasn't worth it.

Even as it is, externally our program shows no difference at all to the patented algorithm, since it does essentially the same thing in an internally different way. Eventually we'll probably be sued, and millions of dollars in fees and legal expenses later, finally convince a jury that no, two databases are not the same as one database and a handful of user-supplied rules. And thats if we're not forced to open our codebase to our competitor, after which we'd pretty much be dead. It'd be what, two days? a week? Before they update their software with new rule-based operation that they just "thought of" and we'd never be able to prove they stole.

The lesson I learned..

[SlashDread]

No matter how un-effing-believable un-democratic EU ministers can be, and you MUST research the EU patent story for some disgusting examples, the people -directly elected- in the EU parliament have listened and -do- hold some power. Yay.

Now if only we (as in we, the people) could get more direct say in EU minister appointments, or resignments.. we would not have to go through all this absurdian EU counsil of minister elbow politics.

We should look at the US.. some things clearly work better there, and some things do not. Much local power for example.. good idea. Big Money and politics.. bad idea.

EU patents a bad thing

[prunesqualour]

There's a decent piece in today's Guardian about patents on software. Interest declared: I wrote it.