On Mon, Mar 08, 2004 at 08:03:59PM +0000, Tom Badran wrote: > On Monday 08 Mar 2004 19:22, Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho wrote: > > The European Patent Office has accepted software patents for some time > > now. Perhaps they would fail a court case, but, as somebody said, do > > you want us to be the test case? > > What europe has is quite different to the american system. There are no > software patents as such, but sufficently complex inventions (including the > algorithms used for mp3 as a specific example) are patentable just like any > other invention. It basically means its very hard to flood the system with > trivial patents like amazon and such do in the US, but genuine inventions are > still protected under patent law. The bar for what is considered an invention > is much, much higher essentially, and it prevents the patenting of 'business > processes'. Go and read some EU patents before you make a statement about them. On my laptop (which I do not have nearby ATM), there's a sticker made by the FFII which contains the patent number of the EU patent on _progress_bars_. If that is "complex" by your standards, I'd like to see what you call "easy". -- Wouter Verhelst Debian GNU/Linux -- http://www.debian.org Nederlandstalige Linux-documentatie -- http://nl.linux.org "Stop breathing down my neck." "My breathing is merely a simulation." "So is my neck, stop it anyway!" -- Voyager's EMH versus the Prometheus' EMH, stardate 51462.
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