On Monday 27 December 2004 13:53, Florian Weimer wrote:
> * Andrew Suffield:
> >> Fraunhofer is not the sole patent holder. It even gets better: The
> >> list of patents on mp3licensing.com (Thomson's official site on MP3)
> >> is incomplete. 8-)
> >
> > All of these appear to be patents on encoding, or postprocessing (some
> > of them also appear to be invalid). You probably can't have a patent
> > on decoding in the EU.
>
> You deleted the part about the patent on a transmission system
> involving compression. The relevant European patents are EP 0400755,
> EP 0402973, EP 0599824 and EP 0660540.
as current EU legislation explicitly forbids software-patents[1] none of
those are currently legal. _If_ we loose the current legaslitive battle
that might change, but sofar we seem to be winning (be it with some close
calls countering the underhanded maneuvers of the pro-patent lobby).
[1] In article 52 of the European Patent Convention of 1973 it is stated
that mathematical methods, intellectual methods, business methods, computer
programs, presentation of information etc are not inventions in the sense
of patent law
--
Cheers, cobaco (aka Bart Cornelis)
1. Encrypted mail preferred (GPG KeyID: 0x86624ABB)
2. Plain-text mail recommended since I move html and double
format mails to a low priority folder (they're mainly spam)
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