Software patents: They're back!

Jeroen Dekkers jeroen at vrijschrift.org
Sun Feb 5 21:53:08 UTC 2006


At Sun, 5 Feb 2006 21:48:31 +0100,
xdrudis wrote:
> 
> El Sun, Feb 05, 2006 at 05:05:08PM +0100, Patrick Ohnewein deia:
> > 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?
> > 
> > http://www.economic-majority.com/supporter.en.php?show=all
> 
> 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.

The FFII is working on it: http://wiki.ffii.org/Cpedu0510En. You can
also help, the discussion about this is currently happening on the bxl
mailinglist (http://lists.ffii.org/mailman/listinfo/bxl).

Economic-majority.com is also an FFII initiative by the way.

> > 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

That's FFII news page for non-patent stuff. The page about software
patent news is: http://wiki.ffii.org/SwpatcninoEn


Jeroen Dekkers



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