From nico@monnet.to Thu, 9 Dec 1999 15:00:00 +0100 (CET)
Date: Thu, 9 Dec 1999 15:00:00 +0100 (CET)
From: Nicolas MONNET nico@monnet.to
Subject: [Patents] Re: [Patents] Re: [Patents] Prosecution

On Wed, 8 Dec 1999, JPS wrote:

|The likely outcome of EU patent directive and European patent law is
|that there will be patents on programmes, simply because the only people
|who do not want patents are
|	- the open source community
|	- some independent software publishers
|
|All others (IP experts, lawyers, big corporations, patent offices, many
|researchers, etc.) are in favour of software patents.

Not all big corporations. I'm not nitpicking. I think you're 
putting your pessimism in the wrong place. The real reason why
software Patents are likely to appear here is not because of
a lack of (potential) opposition, it's for the same reason the
people demonstrated in Seattle: 

        The decision makers are totally disconnected from 
        the democratic process.

Nobody will be held accountable for the bad decisions taken at 
the EPO, the WTO, and whatever 3 letter acronym you can find.
And, after all, that's all that counts when a treaty of any
kind is signed between countries. It all happens between
closed doors. And then, hop, too late.

Lobbyists are free to act in that kind of environment; they're not playing
in the same field as their opponents. 

In the grand scheme of things, this relates to the fact that more and
more, despite our so called 'socialist' governments here in Europe, the
rights of citizens are alienated by corporations. We're not talking about
copyrights no this list ... however, isn't it fascinating to notice how
the punishment on copyright violation are amazingly outrageous compared to
the actual damage caused, and almost always directed at INDIVIDUALS? What
I mean is, corporations infringing on other's copyright would see little
consequence in comparison.



Now ... how do we solve the software patent issue? We need to get famous
figures to talk about it. What if Linus Torvalds, just to name one, would
mention the software patents problem whenever he was given an interview?





-- 
Nicolas MONNET, Technical Director, IT-Xchange

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