-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
EU software patent issue goes to appeals body
,----[ Quote ]
| Alison Brimelow, president of the European Patent Office, has referred the
| deeply contentious question about how to assess the patentability of
| software-related inventions to her office's top appeals body, the enlarged
| board of appeal (EBoA), the EPO said late Friday.
|
| [....]
|
| In November 2006 Neal Macrossan, an Australian entrepreneur software
| developer, lost an appeal against the U.K. Patent Office's rejection of his
| patent application. He wanted patent protection for a method for producing
| documents "for use in the formation of a corporate entity using a data
| processing system."
|
| On the same day the U.K. Court of Appeal threw out a challenge against a
| patent owned by IT company Aerotel for a computer program that created a new
| network infrastructure for a group of computers.
|
| The three judges presiding over the cases considered the first a business
| method, and therefore unpatentable, while the second was seen as a patentable
| hardware change. Another U.K. judge called for a referral to the EPO's top
| appeals body to clarify the law concerning software patentability.
`----
http://www.nytimes.com/external/idg/2008/10/24/24idg-EU-software-pat.html
Related:
[KDE developer:] stupid patents
,----[ Quote ]
| Many of Apple's concepts such as icons stacks, parabolic zooming in panels
| and (most recently) widgets on media centers that they seem to feel are
| patentable are either unoriginal or just plain trivial.
|
| [...]
|
| Future society will look back upon us and cluck their tongue at how stupid we
| were for having let the patent system encroach upon things such as software
| on the one hand and become so baroque a system as to be generally lacking
| usefulness on the other.
`----
http://aseigo.blogspot.com/2008/02/stupid-patents.html
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.9 (GNU/Linux)
iEYEARECAAYFAkkC4kQACgkQU4xAY3RXLo6fugCeIMVhjHCV6oWFzm/HKOo3Ka1E
cAcAoIdqebJhmPmJ2+MCBiNQSNRKreUd
=WrCR
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
|
|
