EU Gears Up for Another Patent Fight

DirkFromEurope writes "Heise Online is reporting on the Digital Europe meeting of the Progress & Freedom Foundation in Prague. From the article: 'Proponents for a broadening of industrial property rights in the computer sector have declared a new round in the fight about software patents in the EU opened. "It starts again", announced Günther Schmalz, head of SAP's software department.' Günther also 'expressed hope that his camp will be better prepared this time than during the last struggle. A "bridge position" must be reached, which both sides could live with.'"

Comments

Software Patents Aren't Bad

[Luke PiWalker]

Software patents are not an inherently bad idea. What makes them bad in practice, and in the way they've been used in our legal system is two things: 1 - Software should NOT be simultaneously closed source and patented. They are two different protection schemes that are incompatable. Patents requires that you make your design and plans public and openly copyable so others can search on the patent archive and see what you're doing (and so that when you right to exclusivity ends, your idea is now in a public registry). In the case of software, that would be the source code, although pseudocode that doesn't actually compile, but merely teaches somoene how to write the software would probably fit the legal requirement (more akin to a blueprint than a cad/cam file)). The practice of allowing people to patent things based on vague fuzzy descriptions of algorithms should never have started. 2 - Patents in general (not just software) should not be allowed for ideas that are already known within the community of inventors (or programmers in this case). The Patent office doesn't bother checking this requirement anymore (or at least if they are attempting to do so they are obviously failing at it). When this isn't done, the owner of an idea ends up being the one with no scruples who decided to usurp ownership of the public idea first, rather than the one that thought of the idea first.