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European Commission Reverses its Views on Patents

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the maybe-not dept.

prostoalex writes "ZDNet UK News reports "The European Commission said last week that computer programs will be excluded from patentability in the upcoming Community Patent legislation, and that the European Patent Office (EPO) will be bound by this law". Politician Adam Gierek posted a question to European Commission asking the institution to clarify its standings on software patents."

5 of 181 comments (clear)

  1. Clarify please? by geminidomino · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Does this mean they reversed last week's decision, or that last week's decision WAS the reversal?

  2. Does this mean patent immunity for EU corps? by ArghBlarg · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Can EU-based companies then freely do work to interoperate/reverse-engineer things made by the (insane) US software industry? I hope to $DIETY so. This would force the US software industry to actually focus on quality and usefullness instead of paying lawyers to lock the latest trivial feature up in patents.

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    ERROR 144 - REBOOT ?
    1. Re:Does this mean patent immunity for EU corps? by Chowderbags · · Score: 3, Interesting

      That leads me to ponder something: If a European company distributed software that contained US patented code over the internet (and thus not having a physical presence in the US), how would that court case go? Assuming that they were found in the wrong, would there even be a way to get damages (short of pulling another Dmitry Sklyarov)?

  3. It will be nice to see by Null+Nihils · · Score: 5, Interesting

    a steady flow of independent innovation pouring in to the UK if they do end up getting rid of the illogical legislation standing in the way of software progress (I will refrain from using the word "innovation").

    Microsoft (and anyone else commanding a patent arsenal) are saying the opposite, of course; that the market will shrink, not expand. It sure would be nice to see them eat their words if the UK does continue in a no-software-patents direction and smaller, more inventive companies take advantage of their new freedom.

  4. America says: Size Matters. Europe Disagrees? by Codename.Juggernaut · · Score: 3, Interesting

    As it was once said:

    Any computer program or file, when saved, is a massive binary number set up for a computer to interpret. In effect, this large, multi-million-digit number is all a program or file is. The rest is simply representation and imagination. In fact, that's what "digital" means.

    Now, you cannot patent fact, and numbers are fact. I cannot patent the number 7 and sue anyone who uses it (yet), since the number 7 simply is. I didn't invent it, it's always been there (let's not dabble too far into philosophy though), and as far as I'm aware, there is no rule of thumb to say "the number 12 cannot be patented, but the number 110101010111001E3,000,000" can.

    Any program or file ever written/saved on a computer can be compiled and decompiled into a giant binary number. (That's simply how it's stored) So technically, by the law that a number cannot be patented, neither can any digital representation of anything.

    Does this really factor down into a ruling of whether the size of a number makes it any less a number?