Re: [Patents] The politics of software over-protection -- moving forward..

[Enrico Weigelt <weigelt@metux.de>]

On Sat, Apr 26, 2003 at 08:18:38PM +0200, Norbert Bollow wrote:

Hi folks,

<snip>
> The only way to prevent this kind of emergency from happening
> over and over again is political action to get rid of software
> patents totally.  
Yes. Currently these are illegal here in Europa, but some people 
want to change this. We hope we can prevent them from leagalizing
text patents.

I by myself (as well as an against-textpatents-activist and as
commercial software developer) spend quite much time in seeking 
the net for addresses of it companies and writing to them, 
explaining the disaster of text patents and call them for help.
Event if we fail to protect Europa from text patents, i wont stop
doing this - but then especially showing the companies where they
break patents and could be attacked.
For example i'm currently telling webshop developers and owners,
that these things are breaking some patents.

<snip>
> Well, theoretically it would be good enough to have a patent law 
> system that allows GPL'd Free Software to implement anything regardless 
> of any patents, but I'm afraid that the influence of lobbyists could 
> too easily render any legal definition of "Free Software" GPL-incompatible, 
> so that won't work.
No, this way is completely wrong. Software-Patents are bad and dont become
better if some folks dont have to fear of them - we mustnt split the parties. 
Not only free software, but free speach - especially smaller software 
companies - are extremely endangered by text patents. We must concentrate
all folks which are endangered together. The more people/work is affected
by text patents, the more people are fighting against them, and the bigger
the chance to kick them away.

I would prefer changing the GPL to forbid any form of use for companies
which are holding text patents or companies controlled by those ones.
This would extremely hurt some folks which are using free software 
(like GNU/Linux) very much and endagering it by text patents.
For example IBM - they belong to the companies with the most text patents 
and which are filing thousands over thousands new patents a year.

> Get rid of software patents completely - that's the only realistically
> achievable political solution.
Yes. We must tell evryone, that text patens may not exist.

cu

PS: the original posting was crossposted to many people/lists,
i've CCed them all - but how do we want to handle this ? 
concentrate on one list ? create an new list ?
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