Software Patents Circumvent European Parliament

Tom writes "Despite the european parliament's vote to exclude software patents, the patent lobby is pressing forward and patentability of software is on the agenda of a workgroup whose advise the european council will likely follow. The european council is at odds with the parliament concerning their stance on software patents. The patent lobby is facing a narrow loss in the parliament, which has voted against software patents, but now circumvents democracy by convincing the council. If they succeed, software patents could be coming to Europe before christmas." <update> The links above seem to have stopped working for me - however, ffii is carrying the news as well.

An editor that checks links?

[WIAKywbfatw]

Truly, Christmas has come early this year!

Re:This gets me so totally angry

[Anonymous Coward]

Pin an angry note to someone's chest?

Re:1950: What if we had Software Patents back then

[Hatta]

How about it it happened in 1980: Makers of Wordstar and Visi-calc whould have locked the wordprocessing and Spreadsheet markets, respectively. Makers of CP/M would lockup PC OS' so MS would never have existed!

So we'd have 2 of the best applications ever written and no microsoft? Well this isn't looking so bad after all. ;)

Re:Some corrections and overview

[Anonymous Coward]

I know, I know, we dutch keep shooting the wrong politicains.

As soon as I get my patent...

[Anonymous Coward]

...on "Method for circumventing European parliament", they are toast.