[Fsfe-ie] Swpat vote set for Tuesday, with public deliberation

[Fergal Daly]

On Sun, May 16, 2004 at 10:43:29AM +0100, James Heald wrote:
> Fergal Daly wrote:
> 
> >Where can I get the actual text that is being considered? I couldn't find a
> >link to it on FFII,
> 
> Latest text we have is the version for which we believe the Presidency 
> managed to get a qualified majority on COREPER (dated 3 May 2004)
> 
> HTML conversion:
> http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/europarl0309/cons0401/st09051/st09051.html
> 
> Original pdf:
> http://vitke:mipri@swpat.ffii.org/papers/europarl0309/cons0401/SRC/st09051.en.pdf

Is the stuff preceding the articles and ammendments just waffle? Will it
exist in law or does it disappear and only the articles remain relevant.

If it doesn't disappear then they seem to have rules out protection of code
snippets and business methods

I thought this was funny:

(16) The competitive position of European industry in relation to its major
trading partners will be improved if the current differences in the legal
protection of computer-implemented inventions are eliminated and the legal
situation is transparent. With the present trend for traditional
manufacturing industry to shift their operations to low-cost economies
outside the European Union, the importance of intellectual property
protection and in particular patent protection is self-evident.

"self-evident" - up there with "it stands to reason" as the refuge of those
who have neither evidence nor reason. Companies in Europe can get patents
around the world regardless of Europe's patent laws, so exports will be
unaffected. Companies will try to sell into Europe regardless of Europe's
patent laws and if software is unpatentable it means that external companies
will have no advantage (and all the usual disadvantages) when competing
against European companies. The only influence stronger patent laws could be
to drive researchers out of Europe so that their work cannot be hindered by
patent claims,

F