A UK Euro MP, Arlene McCarthy is preparing the groundwork here, and you can read her views in the links given below, where, at least in my humble opinion, she is completely misrepresenting the dangers and likely effects on this (almost certain) change to the legislation that she is spearheading. We need those of you in the UK to write to your MPs (and MEPs), and the rest of you in Europe to be active in at least letting your politicians know your views. Otherwise like Tim and I you will spend more time studying patents and patent law (probably fruitlessly) than you do developing....
From a depressed but sunny south of England..
Richard Clark: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Elysium Ltd, Crowborough, UK - JPEG Editor and WebMaster
'Let standard-authors, thus, like trophies borne - The Dunciad
Appear more glorious as more hacked and torn' ;<{) - Alexander Pope (1688-1744)
Attachment and links follows..
Hello,
Alex Macfie is operating the [EMAIL PROTECTED] mailing list, which may be quite useful at the moment. One can subscribe via
http://www.ffii.org.uk/ http://ffii.org.uk/mailman/listinfo/ffii-uk_ffii.org.uk
I have been supplying it with letters such as the following, for which it seems most appropriate.
----
Dear Mrs Wallis,
You can find the case against the McCarthy/Harbour line argued in very short and polite form in the attachment. Maybe it can be useful for you as a way of drawing colleagues' attention to the dangers of following the McCarthy line without questioning.
In a recent exchange in the Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,970294,00.html http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/story/0,3605,975126,00.html
Mrs McCarthy reiterated her misleading statements along with insinuations about free/opensource software in the style of the Microsoft FUD department. At least she replied for once, which is already a progress.
I am still waiting for an answer to the questions which Xavier Drudis Ferran and I sent to Arlene McCarthy (whether the runlength coding algorithm claim and the network sales system claim, as granted by the EPO, are excluded, as Mrs McCarthy seems to say is her intention, or patentable, as she implies by other statements). The public letters are documented at the top of our
Software Patent News Page http://swpat.ffii.org/index.en.html
Many people would be very grateful if you could find a way to initiate a dialog and make Mrs. McCarthy face the questions which she is evading. One very simple way would be to directly refer to one of the public letters and raise a few questions of your own, perhaps confirming that some of our questions are worthwhile to ask. You were in the CC of the letters, so it would be very natural for you to reply.
What do you think?
Yours sincerely
-- Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance tel. +49-89-18979927 Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation http://swpat.ffii.org/ 145,000 votes 400 firms against software patents http://noepatents.org/
----------
The attachment to this letter can be found at
http://www.ffii.org/proj/kunst/swpat/pamflet/europarl03.pdf
Btw, it is important that a few people from UK come to attend the decisive JURI meetings on monday and tuesday. Libdems and other politicians who may be dodging their constituents need to feel observed. The meetings are public, and we are also getting journalists there.
The t-shirt "PATENT inflation is not a victimless CRIME" is also available in BXL by monday. It is a reference to a t-shirt worn by McCarthy to spearhead the IFPI.org campaign for IP enforcement, called "Piracy is not a victimless Crime".
-- Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance tel. +49-89-18979927 Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation http://swpat.ffii.org/ 145,000 votes 400 firms against software patents http://noepatents.org/
At 21:27 14/06/2003 -0400, Smith, Todd wrote:
Hello Tim,
If you notice this is the same patents that Timeline successfully sued Microsoft over concerning SQL Server 7.0. It seems that the cost-effective license that Microsoft licensed from Timeline for the inclusion of OLAP technology didn't include end-user third-party usage.
Software patents are a extremely bad idea and should be soundly discouraged..
Todd Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
-----Original Message----- From: Tim Churches [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Saturday, June 14, 2003 8:41 PM To: openhealth-list @ minoru-development . com Subject: The evils of software patents
Apropos the recent thread on this list about federated vs consolidated EHRs, and the related discussion of the need to restructure transactional data into forms better suited to aggregate analysis, reporting and other decision-support activities, it is worth having a look at the item under the heading "21st February 2003" at this page on the excellent Software Patents site: http://www.softwarepatent What a world on waste press release about their patent and be amazed.s.co.uk/now/victims.html
It refers to a press release about patents held by Timeline Inc at http://www.tmln.com/press.htm - prepare to be amazed at the sheer bread of their patent claims - I was flabberghasted! Now I have to spend hours reading the relevant patents (and probably failing to reach any conclusion as a result) to determine whether the (to be open sourced) code on which I am now working, which aims at making aggregate analysis of health data faster and easier, will infringe these patents. Increasingly often, I despair...
--
Tim C
PGP/GnuPG Key 1024D/EAF993D0 available from keyservers everywhere or at http://members.optushome.com.au/tchur/pubkey.asc Key fingerprint = 8C22 BF76 33BA B3B5 1D5B EB37 7891 46A9 EAF9 93D0
