Cybercrime and Patents in Europe

Hairy1 writes: "The Council of Europe has been working on a Cyber Crime Treaty for some time. The final version is now available, and makes interesting reading." The submitter points out that treaty signers will be obligated to create legislation, as the UK already has, to force people to disclose passwords and encryption keys to the authorities. The U.S. may well sign this treaty - we've participated in the drafting process. On a slightly different note, people are up in arms because the European Patent Office has decided, apparently on its own, that software programs are patentable. Update: 11/09 15:23 GMT by M : A reader sent in this interesting bibliography of the treaty's history.

Software Patents?

[mESSDan]

Finally! I've got this great program I've been working on, I'm not going to disclose the ultra secret source code here, but let me tell you, It's awesome. You run it and it displays:

Hello World!

You want my password?

[InfinityWpi]

Gee, sorry, I can't seem to remember it. Contempt of court? Fine. Hey, charge my company while you're at it, they're the ones who make me change it every other month and never write it down...

Re:Very important things

[geggibus]

I can hear bush in my head:
"Those who are't signing this must be terrorists!"

/K