El Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 05:05:08PM +0100, Patrick Ohnewein deia:
Hi Georg,
a very informative article. It was a chance for me to recheck some noSwPats sites. I was a little shocked to see, that the contents seam to be deprecated on all sites. But of course if the enemy isn't visible, nobody will be willing to fight.
In my case if I'm not helping it's not so much for this reason but for lack of time .
I think the enemy is as visible as ever. The question is that last time we had a software patent directive proposal (in a bit of disguise, right, but it was a directive proposal whose only purpose was legalising swpats). No there's a comunity patent initiative that may indeed help make the swpat situation worse but which has many other things in scope, and may not even legalise swpats, just make them more abundant and more enforceable, which is bad enough.
So last time was a direct (stealth) attack and now it's kind a wider sweep.
Take my words with a grain of salt since I'm not so very well informed, but my impression is that even though the current move may very well try to bring swpats back (not really back, since the problems with swpats didn't go away with the rejection of the directive, no matter how much a success that was), it is in a more wider context.
So maybe this time is more important to discuss whether counting patents is really an indicator of innovation (specially when disregarding the criteria for granting such patents, for example by comparing the number of patents for two territories with different patentable subject matter), whether we want more patent quantity or more patent quality (i.e. do we want to promote innovation by being more strict when granting a patent or to promote monopolies by granting more patents, even in patentable fields), and above all whether we want to take measures to issue more patents (by making them way cheaper for the patent applicant) when our current system for issuing patents (the EPO) is clearly not doing its job properly and is quite out of democratic control. Giving the EPO the power to grant more patents, each patent being cheaper and wider in geographical scope (with current European patents each patent may designate only some member states to save costs, but each comunity patent will affect all the UE, which is an added patent pressure for those territories who aren't an interesting enough market for the european patent).
I write this e-mail to ask, if the FSFE has some reccomandations about the questionary "Consultation on future patent policy in Europe":
http://europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/indprop/patent/consultation_en.htm
Is a request to fill out the questionary planed, should this questionary be used as a chance for european companies to communicate their disagreement to software patents?
If it can be a chance, should a request be send out to the companies, which already communicated their disagreement to software patents?
Yes, possibly. I'd tend to express disagreement with EPO practice, structure and unaccountability which in particular for a sw company has much to do with the granting of swpats. But people and organisations in other non-patentable fields may have quite the same concerns. And people in patentable fields unsatified with the quality of EPO work might also join in.
So maybe just like last time it wasn't about free software but about software in general, although the free software community had ample reason to worry, this time maybe it isn't about software patents but about patents in general, although software is probably going to suffer from it.
And my last question ( for now ;) ) Is there a site which will be an aggregator of all the sites and activities (ffii, nosoftwarepatents, ip-watch, blogs, ...) against software patents in europe?
news collection here, but possibly not what you mean ?
http://wiki.ffii.org/FfiinewsEn