Mario Monti rebuttal?

[Xavi Drudis Ferran]

El Thu, Mar 25, 2004 at 12:14:30AM +0000, Alex Hudson deia:
> On Wed, 2004-03-24 at 23:51, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote:
> > Of course not. What they're forced to is to create a RAND licensing
> > scheme for their IP. This is unacceptable for competing Free Software.
> 
> I'm not sure they are saying RAND. The decision posted appears to be
> sceptical of IP rights subsisting within the disclosed documents;
> they're just not excluding the possibility. If you can patent APIs,
> frankly, we have bigger problems than Microsoft.
> 

What do you mean "patent APIs" ? . If you can patent "software not as such" 
you can possibly encumber any program by patenting what the API does. 
I don't think you can patent how you call the methods or what parameters
they get, but if you can patent the algorithms, data structures, compression, 
protocols, etc. it means still nobody can use the API.

I agree thatwe need to leave the benefit of doubt for CEC and 
wait until they publish the decision, but from the imperfect info we 
have I'd say they could put their interfaces on RAND in as much as they
can patent software. 


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Xavi Drudis Ferran
xdrudis at tinet.org