[Preston] More on software patents

[Guy Heatley]

I think ultimately there should be some law that protects software developers 
from having to worry about patents in the general "practice of their art". If 
a patent can easily or inadvertently be infringed then it should not have 
been granted in the first place.

Some guy was arguing (on the FFII mailing list) that the threat of being sued 
for some inadvertent patent infringement caused him to fear for his 
capability to carry out his job properly as a software developer, and was 
therefore an infringement upon his human rights.

It's interesting to see that what is in effect a restrictive trade practice 
has been given the spin that it is in the interests of "improving 
competition" in the EU Commission document.
-- 
Guy

On Monday 04 April 2005 00:06, Matthew T. Atkinson wrote:
> 'ello,
>
> Thanks for that description of the workshop you attended.  I especially
> appreciate the facts and figures you explained.  I hope that the UKPO
> take note of the majority being against software patents.  One would
> hope that they'd trust the judgement of software developers (but as this
> makes sense, I am not so sure they will...)
>
> I think that one of the biggest problems that the opposition to Software
> Patents faces is that right now it just isn't seen to be such an
> important issue by most people because of all the other stuff that's
> going on.  But 50 years down the line of having Software Patents, the
> general public will be locked-in to whatever proprietary stuff is
> fashionable (maybe Longhorn if it's out by then, running on
> TCPA-certified Pentium 42 processors), innovation will have been stifled
> and it'll be too late to do anything about it.
>
> I still have hope that some form of sense may prevail as there are now
> many people and companies that use F/OSS and hopefully, therefore,
> policing such an abominable law may be impractical.  But the fact that
> all this is being considered -- and now evidently approved -- is
> incredibly hard to take.
>
> bye just now,
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