Thanks to Charles Esson
for this link.
“The EU’s current plans to extend patent law to software has
been attacked by the EuroLinux Alliance, which points out that
current European patent law is already being abused by major
companies. The net effect of the continuation of this abuse, or of
new laws applying patents to software, will be to make life
practically impossible for smaller software developers.”
“… although software isn’t patentable in Europe under the
Munich Convention, the European Patent Office (EPO) has been
granting patents which can be used to protect programming
techniques, computer programmes and software.”
“The subject is due to come up on Thursday at the Intellectual
Property Conference in Paris, where moving to a US-style patent
model will be discussed.”