On 20040308T205028+0100, Carlos Perelló Marín wrote: > El lun, 08-03-2004 a las 20:22, Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho escribió: > > 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? > > That's not true 100%: > http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/plen0924/index.en.html Actually, it is true (even the Finnish Patent Office has started accepting software patents, citing EPO's practice), and your URL is totally irrelevant to this discussion. Yes, there is a directive in the works, but what it does is either ban the EPO's current conduct or make it undeniably legal. If you don't believe it until you see a web page about it, note these words on the page http://swpat.ffii.org/ : For the last few years the European Patent Office (EPO) has, contrary to the letter and spirit of the existing law, granted more than 30000 patents on rules of organisation and calculation claimed in terms of general-purpose computing equipment, called "programs for computers" in the law of 1973 and "computer-implemented inventions" in EPO Newspeak since 2000. Europe's patent movement is pressing to legitimate this practise by writing a new law. > Of course I'm not suggesting that Debian should be the test case, my > mail was only pointing that we don't have software patents (yet). And you are wrong there, unfortunately. -- Antti-Juhani Kaijanaho, Debian developer http://kaijanaho.info/antti-juhani/blog/en/debian
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