Freeny licensing deals in EU

[Hartmut Pilch <phm@a2e.de>]

According to

        http://www.golem.de/0401/29377.html

E-Data has achieved licensing deals with Microsoft, Tiscali and On Demand
Distribution (OD2). In return for an unknown royalty payment, these three
companies are now allowed to offer music for download.

The only detail of the licensing deals that is disclosed seems to be that 
OD2 is in the start phase and will therefore not pay much.  It is not 
quite unreasonable to assume that the other two are not paying much, if 
anything, either, but are just allowing E-Data to use their name to 
promote their patent enforcement campaign.

The article links to the text version of the e-data/freeny patent on the
swpat.ffii.org site, where the broad claims can be read.

The E-Data/Freeny patent is much older than similarly broad
video-on-demand patents which Acacia recently obtained from the European
Patent Office (EPO) and is also trying to enforce in Europe.

Both E-Data and Acacia patents cover calculation rules framed in terms of
conventional computing equipment and are therefore untenable in Euorpe,
both according to the European Patent Convention and according to the
European Parliament's amendments to the proposed software patent
directive, which confirm the European Patent Convention.

However Commission and Council, backed by ministerial patent officials of
most national governments, are pushing to change the rules so that
calculation rules framed in terms of conventional computing equipment
become patentable.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance             tel. +49-89-18979927
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
300,000 votes 2000 firms against software patents    http://noepatents.org/
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