European Parliament Rejects Software Patents

heretic9 writes "The European Parliament unanimously rejected the software patent bill recently put before it. Hugo Lueders of CompTIA, a pro-patent lobby group, said that the benefits of the bill had been obscured by special interest groups, which muddied debate about the rights and wrongs of software patents." Meaning, essentially, that the Conference of Presidents got its way.

Comments

Re:I Love How Many US Folk Still Don't Get The EU.

[William_Lee]

Would someone please mod this parent down as a troll?

Go ahead and fiddle while Rome supposedly burns if it pleases you...

What both parties above fail to realize is that economic trouble for the US benefits noone. I'm not going to go into the details for a troll, but picking up a rudimentary economics textbook might be helpful as a starting point.

It's deja vu all over again circa 1980s Japan and the supposed setting of the sun on the US economic machine...

Open Source Patents?

[MrAnnoyanceToYou]

I have a question. Why doesn't the open source community start patenting the things THEY do which are original and not just state-of-the-art? If you patent it and make the patent 'open' - on the level of the GPL 'open' - wouldn't you (I don't write code, I'm just a n00b) suddenly gain in improvements rather regularly which noone could sell and therefore cause as much havoc with software developers and sellers as their patents would cause for you? It seems that this would create space for Open Source to exist as a strong community of its own, with more 'uniqueness' than Microsoft could provide...

I only say this because, well, I know that the Linux coders I have met are just flat-out better coders and more numerous in the research and development fields of programming than Windows coders... If these Linux coders were to patent everything they did that was 'new' and 'original' they would end up patenting more processes and tools simply through outnumbering their opposition.

Re:what are you talking about?

[Alsee]

A small company can seek and win damages in the hundreds of millions if their invention is stolen.

Of course. And no one is opposed to that.

The flaw in your logic is to assume that software is an invention in the first place. Programmers are software authors and they have copyrght protection. Surveys of programmers reveal absolutely overwhelming opposition to the notion that software is a patentable invention. Software is a list of logic steps, nothing but a sequence of thoughts. It may take a long time, but software can be run by a brain in pure thought. I'm a programmer, running software mentally is a routine part of writing and debugging software.

Software patent == Logic patent == absurd.

You can invent and patent a new and non-obvious physical object or a new and non-obvious physical process, but you cannot invent or patent an equation. You cannot invent or patent a series of mental steps.

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