Dutch Say No to Software Patent Directive

Rik writes "Thursday night the Dutch parliament has decided that the Dutch government should not vote for the EU Software Patent Directive at the European Council of Ministers next week. The decision of the Dutch parliament strengthens attempts of MEPs of the European Parliament to send the Software Directive back to the drawing board."

Comments

Re:Can't we get rid of patents altogether

[bbc]

There is no such thing as intellectual property law. The things we are discussing here have nothing to do with property. So accusing somebody of lacking an understanding of your so-called "intellectual property law" is misleading and unfair.

Copyrights do not protect expressions, and patents do not protect ideas. Instead, they protect the interests of publishers and large manufacturers respectively. I don't know how this went with patents/manufacturers, but in the case of copyrights, the basic idea has been from the start to protect the interests of the publishers. This is witnessed by the fact that a law that was initially designed to stem the immoral dealings of (some) publishers was more or less dictated by those same publishers.

It's as if the Maffia helped draft the anti-racketeering laws.