“The Eurolinux Alliance of European commercial software
publishers and non-profit associations has published an open letter
and congratulates British Telecom for providing the world with a
brilliant proof of the absurdity of software patents. British
Telecom, which owns a US patent on Web hyperlinks (US4873662,
“Information handling system and terminal apparatus therefor”) has
apparently decided to sue all Internet Service Providers in the
United States for infringement on their patent. To ensure that
similar absurd disputes do not happen in Europe in the near future,
and to save software innovation in Europe, EuroLinux urges all
businesses and citizens in Europe to sign its Campaign for a
Software Patent Free Europe which already collected 6000 signatures
in 5 days.”
“BT’s move gives a brilliant overview of the great dangers of
Software Patents in the information society:
- Software patents create tremendous juridical uncertainty, thus
blocking innovation - Software patents create monopolies on Internet standards, thus
blocking competition”
“BT’s move also shows the absurdity of the software patent system
as it stands in the US. BT was granted its patent nearly 15 years
ago for a software concept which may have seemed new and inventive
at the time. But such a patent, by being so abstract and general,
has actually given BT the right to strangle the development of the
World Wide Web and a lot of related technologies, which owe nothing
to the inventive effort of BT. Even BT themselves took more than 10
years to discover that the scope of their own patent included
Hyperlinks on the Web.”