Re: Software-Patents

* Tuukka Toivonen <[email protected]> [2004-01-09 18:36:42 +0200]:

Hi,

> >Do we want to take care of them or simply ignore this probem ?
> 
> I don't _want_ to take care of it, but maybe that's necessary. Hopefully
> someone else will do it ;)

well, I also dont want to care of it, but in fact we dont have any real
other chance. If we dont act _NOW_, we will someday mett in court, but
then its too late.

I personally am quite active in this area, i.e. doing press work, writing
texts for EU politicians, contacting other people. We of the FFII have
already reached much - the first decision in the EU Parliament had 
voted against software patents, but this was just the first round.
Because of the political processes in the EU, it will be quite hard
to get a reasonable result in the second vote! The war is not won!

Every developer should at least make as much publicity for our problems
as he can. He should show his users, that his whole work may soon become
completely illegal if software patents become legalized.

<snip>
> >If we would, we have to design around them (this also would mean
> >not any thought of compatibility w/ DirectShow, etc). It will be a very
> 
> I think that any compatibility should be achieved with some extra layer so
> that it wouldn't affect the actual API.
Nevertheless, this layer would be illegal.

<snip>
> True, but..
> 
> >since we cant really know whats patented,
> 
> In principle we can: just look into the patent databases. At least U.S.
> patents are available in the web, I don't know about others.
It is quite hard to get EU-patents and find out what they're really doing.
We have already found countless of very broad and trivial patents,
which cannot be worked around. For example XOR-cursors, webshops, 
on-call-generated websites, ...

<snip>
> >until an patent owner files a lawsuit against us.
> 
> A lawsuit doesn't indicate that a patent is valid, it's the judge.
> The problem is that nobody wants to go that far or even to the lawsuit
> stage.
Well, who of us can pay the process ?
And another problematic point: here in Europa the judges get only very
very little chances for declaring patents invalid. In the USA the courts
have much more space for those decisions than the Europeans will have
if the patent lobbyists succeed with their directive.


<snip>
> My suggestion for somebody worried about patents (and others): start
> searching and collecting patent numbers that may be problematic. Then when
> somebody is actually coding a similar thing, he can read the patent (if
> worried).
And what does this help ?
We have to fight against the problem itself and not trying to get around 
them. If you have a broken leg, you dont just try to not to walk, you try
to repair it!


Here in Europa, software patents are currently not allowed. (Art.52EPA
explicitly forbids them). But nevertheless the europ. patent offices 
have granted more than 30.000 illegal software patents. Most of them
very broad and trivial. Those trivial patents now should be legalized.
We (FFII) want to conserve the current law which forbids sw-patents
and enforce the patent offices to _respect the law_.

We cannot accept, that some lawyers may come around and take others'
work or forbid them working on severyl things!


cu
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