On Tue, 2005-01-18 at 09:37 +0100, Bernhard Schauer wrote: > > And almost all of them are pure software-patents and probably prior art. > > Thus they are - at least in Europe - not relevant and actually illegal > > if you believe in the current European patent law as defined by the > > European Patent Convention (see §52(2) for details). > > Hopefully nothing will change in future! Except the European Patent
In terms of above statement, yes. It actually needs means to seriously control the EPO and national POs - there absolutely no independent justice (similar to other democratic systems) there. Nevertheless the evil propaganda was working since years to get the decision makers (read: law and politics folks with (almost) no knowledge of "programming", "software" and/or copyright/author's rights) to believe in "monopolies on ideas are good for small companies". And there are other forces pushing in that direction but without prove I won't speak about it .... > Office should stop to give away software patents (even if they have no > legal basis). >From a juristical point of view (and "they" are actually saying that) they are "legal" (since they are granted) - even there are severe concerns (read: there are not fulfilled in any way) about the preconditions. However the POs get more money from granted patents than from not granted ones (for actually less work - for the patent proving person it is more work to seriously explain a declined patent instead of - more or less - simply accepting it) and the POs have absolutely no risk. Guess what will happen ..... Bernd, stopping now since it is quite off-topic here -- Firmix Software GmbH http://www.firmix.at/ mobil: +43 664 4416156 fax: +43 1 7890849-55 Embedded Linux Development and Services - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to [EMAIL PROTECTED] More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/