EU Software Patents

Olivier Berger oberger at april.org
Sun Nov 26 09:27:27 UTC 2000


Hmmm... I think I have to correct things :( :

Armin Herbert a écrit :
> 
> Hi Jeff,
> 
> On 25-Nov-00 Jeff Davies wrote:
> 
> > I just saw on www.linuxtoday.com that all 20 EU member states had voted
> > against software patents. Hopefully this is true, and the borg are
> > banished for a couple of years at the very least. Any comments/news??
> 
> The story you've read is only partly correct; in fact, they didn't vote
> yet. They ("they" are all part-taking countries of the European Patent
> Convention, except Austria, Liechtenstein and Switzerland) did just come
> to the agreement to not allow Software Patents.
> 

The EPC counts 20 members, some of them are members of the European
Union, others not.

> A decision of the EU (meaning, the European Comission (20 members) is
> expected on Dec, 15. The European Comission wants to see some "expert"
> report (meaning, statements from the business) first.
> 

As far as I know, the EU counts only 15 members at the present time. 

> As a summary we can say that Europe will be free of software patents,
> that's right :-)
> 

Not at all.

If the EU soon decides to have them in the EU, the EPO (European Patent
Office) will soon decide ta have them too... so the fight is not over
even if we allready won a battle.

Now, for more details and explanations on all that, and what's ahead : 
http://petition.eurolinux.org/pr/pr6.html
http://petition.eurolinux.org/pr/pr7.html
http://petition.eurolinux.org/pr/pr8.html

Please, spread the word, and don't hesitate if something is not really
clear.

-- 
Olivier BERGER - Secrétaire de l'association APRIL 
APRIL (http://www.april.org) - Vive python (http://www.python.org)
Pétition contre les brevets logiciels : http://petition.eurolinux.org



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