[Patents] Re: [Fwd: The dready threat of Hague Convention]

[phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)]

> Sure, we don't need "standard" audience; we need the interested
> parties' audience; audience of programmers, computer journalists,
> scientists.

Just yesterday a paper of a commission from the German Christian
Democratic Party (CDU) opted for short-term software patents and said that
compensatory measures needed to be taken to balance the
"legitimate security interests of consumers" against the interest of
"authors" in patents.

>From this paper I could see clearly that they have no clue and are just
trying to find a way to consider the "author's rights" rather than just
follow the perceived "opensource social romanticism".

Therefore I now tend to argue that we are fighting for the intellectual
property of software authors who see themselves expropriated by patents.
Lawyers are introducing a contradictory system where one right defeats the
other, to make lawyers happy at the expense of programmers.

It is good not to link this to Skylarov, because in fact we are here not
fighting a battle between copyright owners and consumers but between
copyright owners and patent lawyers.  The latter party benefits from the
privilege of the incumbent, while they are really the adventurists, and
from the perception that they are pretending to be defending property,
while they are really destroying it.  People still do not see through this
masquerade, and we have not done everything to help them see through it.

--
Hartmut Pilch                                           http://phm.ffii.org/
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation        http://swpat.ffii.org/
85000 signatures against software patents         http://www.noepatents.org/