> Software patents are threating the freedom of programmers and users of > free software in Europe alike. If this becomes a reality then the Free > Software Community will suffer a hard blow to say the least. So if you > live in Europe please take this seriously, make your voice heard and > tell all other satisfied users of free software products about it!
The exploitive nature of software patents is shown pretty clearly by Microsoft's US patent on cascading style sheets, applied for in 1995 and granted this year. http://www.w3.org/1999/02/Patent-Statement It appears that a company can discover the Internet and then take out patents on the technology it finds there. (You mentioned this in your mail but it was lost in the detail.) But these are really ordinary patents. If you invent a method of doing something it doesn't matter whether it is implemented in hardware or software. If the EU is legislating patents for software specifically, then (without knowing the details) it may be a good thing. It could mean that software is being taken out of the scrum of patents in general, and that more appropriate rules will therefore be applied to it. It may be that is will become extremely difficult to patent the solutions to software problems. And that is what cascading style sheets are. Rather than railing at software patents, maybe we should do just what the EU is doing, introduce patents for software, thereby making software unpatentable except under special rules that take account of the nature of software invention and development.
