Article about the dangers of software patents

national | miscellaneous | news report Wednesday May 08, 2002 14:51 by Marc

Stallman: Software patents victimise developers

The EU - Commission is going to introduce SWpatents.

Software patents are victimising developers with a system which is making it increasingly difficult to write programs, according to free software guru Richard Stallman

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,s2107481,00.html

Richard Stallman can be found at

http://www.stallman.org

For European Petition see
http://www.eurolinux.org

Myriads of information and International Campaign
http://swpat.ffii.org
http://swpat.ffii.org/analysis/bending/index.en.html

UK Campaign
http://www.eurorights.org

For the last few years the European Patent Office has, contrary to the letter and spirit of the existing law, granted about 30000 patents on computer-implementable rules of organisation and calculation (programs for computers). Now the European patent movement wants to change the law so as to legalise this practise and remove all barriers to patentability. Programmers are to lose their freedom of expression and the control over their copyrighted work. Citizens are to be barred from independently developping their preferred forms of communication. As a compensation for this "intellectual expropriation", we are offered ... less innovation, less competition, less good software.

European Commission wants Unlimited Patentability!

The patent system's history can be described as a victorious movement of lawyers against economists. As long as patentable inventions were confined to the realm of applied natural science and only industrially manufactured material objects were monopolised, the negative effects of these monopolies were not widely felt and still seemed, at first glance, justifiable in view of macro-economic advantages such as stimulation of R&D. During the last decades however the patent system has been expanding into "fields of technology", in which it provokes only tearful laughter from specialists in addition to the ever more devastating criticism from economists. Yet patent inflation is continuing at full pace year by year, due to the uncontrolled legislative power of an congregation of believers led by patent offices, patent lawyers and patent departments of various corporations and governments. The victims of the patent landgrab are still relatively dispersed, unaware and unorganised. Fairly visible damage is incurred by small and medium software companies, independent programmers, free/opensource software and even patent jurisprudence, whose recent theoretical disorientation is perhaps most adequately described by means of satire.