The European Patent Convention generally defines whether ideas in a domain are patentable or not. The pertinent part is Article 52 which says: "Patentable inventions (1) European patents shall be granted for any inventions, in all fields of technology, provided that they are new, involve an inventive step and are susceptible of industrial application. (2) Read more »
Here’s a report from a breakfast meeting I was at yesterday on the topic of SMEs and the Community Patent. There were 50 seats, all full. The speakers included representatives from the Commission, the Parliament, and the Slovenian EU Presidency. The most interesting part was the speech by a Director of the European Commission. She Read more »
Frequently Asked Question: Do software patents exist in the EU? Answer: The problem is that software patents exist in some ways in the EU. The power of patent governance is split between a legislature, an executive, and a judiciary. The legislature (the European Patent Convention) says that software ideas are not patentable. The executive (the Read more »
A look at the good and bad of four proposed methods for fighting software patents. Prior art Patent pools Our licences Lobbying 1. Prior art The plan: build up a catalogue of ideas that exist in free software projects so that when a free software developer is threatened with patent infringement, we can point out Read more »
The software patents battle will return this Winter. Nothing much is happening this week, so this isn’t a call to arms. This entry is a quick review, a look at what’s coming, and a late report from the European Commission’s July 12th public hearing "Future Patent Policy in Europe" Sections: Background: European patent governance The Read more »
For anyone looking to understand the proposed changes to the GPL for addressing DRM or software patents, I’ve made two documents: DRM and GPLv3 Patents and GPLv3 I just got the relevant proposed changes to the licence, and attached public comments made specifically about each proposed change by Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen. Simple? Hopefully. Read more »
From 17h20 until 19h00 I was standing outside the building of the EU vs. MS anti-trust case hearing, talking to Sean Daly. Sean was previously a journalist and recently moved to Brussels. He contacted me to lend a hand with the PR side of the MS anti-trust case. There were 15 or so other press Read more »
We’ve got 210 people on the (non-mandatory) Attendees registration page, and we’re expecting far more when we open on Thursday. "All-island" is one of the buzzwords, so it’s fitting that this looks to be the biggest free software event ever organised anywhere on the island. How will be follow up after this? How do you Read more »
An academic writing a paper has asked me questions about the software patents directive. So I’ve replied to him, and have turned my answers into a webpage: software patents, looking back. As far as I know he was not involved in this issue until after the directive was rejected, so it provided me with the Read more »
20 minutes against software patents. Whenever the tech media reports bad news about the software patents directive, discussions break out on web and email forums about how something should be done. So here’s my suggestion for how to do something very useful if you can only give maybe 20 minutes: Pick a clueful document, pick Read more »