Bug#48045: debian-policy: non-US is a misnomer

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

Joel Klecker <jk@espy.org> writes:

> You're implying of course that only the US has software patents, 
> which is false. mp3 encoding is covered by both US and German patents 
> and IDEA is claimed to be patented in Europe as well as the US (I 
> think ascom is deliberately misleading as to where it is actually 
> patented however).

AFAIK Germany has recently rejected the idea of allowing software
patents in the EU.

I'm not at all sure about where IDEA's patent holds, but I've got a
mail from Ascom-Tech claiming that it holds in the UK, which I know to
be untrue.

On the whole I think the USA is probably one of the few places that
you'd get a software patent to stand up in court, and given the
quality of some of the patents in question, you'd probably be on
fairly shaky ground even there.

I'd imagine that if mp3 is patented in Germany, then it has been
claimed that anything that implements the algorithm is a
manufacturable mechanism (as opposed to some software running on a
general purpose computer).  This claim is unlikely to stand up to
examination.

Cheers, Phil.