EU Parliament Approves Software Patents (BAD BAD BAD)

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

Source: Slashdot

"'The voting has just ended. Few good and several bad amendments were accepted. The directive proposal was accepted: 361 for, 135 against, 28 abstentions. The precise numbers and results for each amendment will be available on europarl.eu.int tomorrow.' Reader swentel submits this report on the vote (French) with slightly different numbers (364 voting yes, 153 No, 33 abstaining) but just as bad. Watch this story for updates."

:mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:

[7th_Sephiroth]

1. The world cannot have a form of goverment

Where the people who make rules for the every day man, has never even met one.

[ParanoidPat]

2. Your Honor, my software manipulates a series of 1's and 0's......

.....the defendant's software violates my patent by manipulating the very same 1's and 0's......:evilfrown:

[htuttle]

3. Sh*t!

There are a ton of multimedia-related open source programming projects that are going to be screwed because of this. Most of them use codec code they've developed themselves, but could be vulnerable to charges of patent violations via 'reverse engineering' the algorithms.

Time to start downloading a whole bunch of source code before it disappears.

Sh*t!

[AP]

4. Patent protection is shorter than copyright protection

and it requires full disclosure of the code. Also, you have to pay increasing fees to renew patents if you want protection for the full period available, so, if there's no commercial value in the patent, they expire and other people can use them.

I think the jury is still out on this one. The US has given patent protection for software (and for business methods) for a while now.

[ixion]

5. yeah, and look how much trouble that has caused...

you've got companies claiming rights to things that were developed in and academic or scientific environment, that they're now trying to claim rights to. Everything from Frame sets to hyperlinks to plugins to form submissions... it's really screwed up, and it's going to get continually worse if these moronic bureaucrats continue handing out patents for this type of ilk that is generally considered in the public domain.

There's a thread in Op/Ed right now about companies and the government wanting to privatize the internet, and this is one way they're going to go about it.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

6. Privatize the Internet...

...is just a part of the grand plan, which is to privatize thought.

Sometimes I feel mankind is goint to become an ant colony. The members are nothing more than expendable organic machines. Only the goals of the Queen matter.

:mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:

[AP]

10. I'm not sure the internet really has any claim to being public

It's nice that I'm largely free to post whatever I want and think. But, I'm not sure there's any sacred right to a public interent. If it became so heavily regulated that I couldn't do this, I might think about trying to elect politicians who wanted to legislate public internet forums.

[AP]

9. I'm not sure that has happened.

I'm willing to hear you out. However, no company is claiming rights to anything made in an academic environment for which they haven't paid lots of money to the school to acquuire.

That BT suit re hyperlinks hasn't changed anything which has happened on the internet. It's just a suit between two huge corporations.

[Nottingham]

7. Perhaps this is why Sweden voted NO to being in the EU

and why other countries did too!

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

8. Wrong

Sweden (like the UK) voted NO to using the Euro as a currency, but they (like the UK) are very much part of the EU.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

11. UPDATE

From the Slashdot link:

Update: 09/24 15:44 GMT by T: Dr.Seltsam writes to say that the early reports are "not quite correct. The German publisher Heise states in this article, that the vote concerned strong changes on the directive." In particular, "pure software patents will not be allowed." Google's translation engine does a decent job with the German.

So it seems at least this law will be slightly less crazy than the USA one.