freepatents.org opens

Jean-Paul Smets has opened his new site Freepatents.org (mostly in English), which encourages Europe to maintain its no-software patents law. This law is apparently under threat. He's also well known for this study of the economics of free software (in french only at the moment, contact me if you can translate it, but you can use babelfish in the meantime). The new site contains the text of a resolution adopted by the french ISOC at its Autrans meeting, which requests that before Europe introduces any patent law a detailed study be conducted to determine the impact of patents on innovation, competition and free software, and that provisions are added to ensure large corporations cannot use patents as a legal manoeuvre to block innovation, competition and free software. The League of Programming cites example of patent misuse and reasons to be against software patents.

Patenting Software and Algorithms

[Kirth]

Assholes, all of them. Gives me the creeps, like
an ignorant horde of wild lawyers, usurpators,
monopolists and other scum which run over a
peaceful village of things that already work.
XORed Cursors patented, Online-Ads patented,
backing-store in X-Windows patented, etcetc.

Assholes.

grrrrr

[gavinhall]

Posted by Ed Carter:

Has lpf.ai.mit.edu really been slashdotted?

IBM's consent decree

[dalke]

If you read http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/industry-at-risk.htm l you'll see
Fortunately, when IBM was being investigated for antitrust (some time ago) it issued a consent degree permitting the automatic licensing of its patent portfolio. As a result any one patent can be licensed for 1% of royalties, and the entire suite for 5%.

What effect does that have on software distribued gratis? 5% of $0 is $0...

european commission

[ReinoutS]

Funny that the European proposal mentions Edith Cresson, the European Commissioner who has been under heavy fire the last couple of weeks for giving away jobs to close friends and other frauds.

Avoid patented products

[dattaway]

I try to avoid things that are patented, especialy software due to lack of quality. A member of my family who worked at a drug company stated half the payroll went to lawyers, not researchers. Imagine why medicine is so expensive and why drugs have so many side effects. Poor quality makes you buy more.

I wish there was a law that required that if something is patented, it would be stated on the product. This goes for software, too. Seems like some companies just have to have a patent on a product and that is a marketing point: "patented." Like that is supposed to make it great?

link is wrong

[mysty]

The link to that site about the economics of free software points to
slashdot.org . Could Somen fix that
I want to read that.
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UNIX isn't dead, it just smells funny...

Pantents?

[IRNI]

I thought it said freepants. I was getting excited. I need new jeans.

go sengan

[MagicMike]

you've gotten a lot of shit, but these are good links. keep digging for this stuff...its out there.