Subject: Re: IBM Patents
From: Bernd Petrovitsch <bernd@firmix.at>
To: schauer@acousta.at
Cc: lkml <linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org>
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Date: Tue, 18 Jan 2005 10:25:56 +0100
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On Tue, 2005-01-18 at 09:37 +0100, Bernhard Schauer wrote:
> > And almost all of them are pure software-patents and probably prior art.
> > Thus they are - at least in Europe - not relevant and actually illegal
> > if you believe in the current European patent law as defined by the
> > European Patent Convention (see ?52(2) for details).
> 
> Hopefully nothing will change in future! Except the European Patent

In terms of above statement, yes. It actually needs means to seriously
control the EPO and national POs - there absolutely no independent
justice (similar to other democratic systems) there.
Nevertheless the evil propaganda was working since years to get the
decision makers (read: law and politics folks with (almost) no knowledge
of "programming", "software" and/or copyright/author's rights) to
believe in "monopolies on ideas are good for small companies".
And there are other forces pushing in that direction but without prove
I won't speak about it ....

> Office should stop to give away software patents (even if they have no
> legal basis).

>From a juristical point of view (and "they" are actually saying that)
they are "legal" (since they are granted) - even there are severe
concerns (read: there are not fulfilled in any way) about the
preconditions.
However the POs get more money from granted patents than from not
granted ones (for actually less work - for the patent proving person it
is more work to seriously explain a declined patent instead of - more or
less - simply accepting it) and the POs have absolutely no risk. Guess
what will happen .....

	Bernd, stopping now since it is quite off-topic here
-- 
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