Re: [Patents] Washington Times: Internet Patents Divide Industry

[Hartmut Pilch <phm@a2e.de>]

> One very perverse sentence to highlight what's wrong with this article:
>
> "Experts say the 1998 "State Street vs. Signature Financial" decision from
> the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit was an acknowledgment that
> intellectual property was as much about ideas as about things."

Right, and this error permeates the article.  But the following
sentence contains a rare insight, at least for Europeans:

> The U.S. Patent Office had been granting business-method patents for
> years and the court simply signaled its approval.

The same is true of how rules are made here.  And although here it is not
politically correct to give the approval in an understandable way, the
proposed EU Directive nonetheless would give it, see

        Why Amazon One-Click Shopping is Patentable under the EU Directive 
Proposal
        http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/eubsa-swpat0202/tech/

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-18979927
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
155,000 votes 2000 firms against software patents    http://noepatents.org/