Paul Jakma <paul at clubi.ie> writes:
> > There are 25 patent offices in the EU
> And presumably EU patents are all equivalent? (i'm guessing.. EU has
> many equivalence rules).
If you have an idea patented in france, you can sue people that make
unlicensed use that idea in france. and so on...
...but once any EU state accepts a patent application, any software
distributor will have the hassle of keeping their software out of that
country and the german office will be told "but france recognises our
innovation".
> > MS and IBM are paying multi-[bm]illion dollar legal teams to write these
> > patent applications and to argue their court cases.
> This and the general backing of big business for software patents,
> along with fact that USA has them[1], generally leads me to think the
> battle is a no-hoper.
Last September we convinced 70% of the 626 MEPs to vote very clearly against
software idea patents. This year we convinced the Council that software
idea patents are bad, but unfortunately we didn't explain to them what
wording we needed for this goal, so we lost this round.
Now it goes back to the Parliament - so again we have to lobby the (new)
parliament to bring back the good amendments they voted for last September.
Then it goes to a consiliation committee - a mix of some Council members and
some Parliament members.
The majority of politicians are now on our side, and we were slow to start
since, unlike the BSA's lobbyists, we didn't understand the EU system. So
I'm confident that we will win - but this issue is way too important to
leave to chance, we need as many people as possible working on this. If
software is ruled patentable, free software developers, users, distributors,
and related businesses will have a decade of SCO's and MS's and IP law
firms, and ...
> I think the real battle to fight for is tougher examination of patent
> claims.
There's too many of them, and they have no incentive at all to become
tougher (and they answer to no one, and ...).
Wishing that examiners would have higher standards is like wishing that
software users would stop asking stupid questions :)
--
Ciarán O'Riordan
http://www.compsoc.com/~coriordan/
Irish Free Software Organisation: http://ifso.ie
Maintained by the ILUG website team. The aim of Linux.ie is to
support and help commercial and private users of Linux in Ireland. You can
display ILUG news in your own webpages, read backend
information to find out how. Networking services kindly provided by HEAnet, server kindly donated by
Dell. Linux is a trademark of Linus Torvalds,
used with permission. No penguins were harmed in the production or maintenance
of this highly praised website. Looking for the
Indian Linux Users' Group? Try here. If you've read all this and aren't a lawyer: you should be!
