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Wilbert
28th August 2003, 19:50
On September 1st, the plenary of the European Parliament will decide about a law proposal which would establish software patents in Europe. A group of economists from Europe and US specialising in patent questions have published a letter to members of the European Parliament calling them to reject the proposal, accompanied by an analytical paper which casts severe doubts on the reasoning behind the directive and on the methods employed by its proponents.

Some more info can be found here: http://swpat.ffii.org/index.en.html.

You can help by signing the appeal, which can be found at: http://swpat.ffii.org/papri/eubsa-swpat0202/cpedu/index.en.html. The corresponding registry form can also be found on that side. If you want to do more, the side explains how to share your concerns with the Members of the European Parlement.

brashquido
24th September 2003, 13:03
I just found this out myself when I went to download the latest version of MRTG (http://www.mrtg.org). This is a serious threat to the software development community, and I urge all to sign the petition.

temporance
24th September 2003, 14:25
ditto

Anyone that uses Vdub, or xvid, or almost any of the open-source software available on this site should sign the petetion and hope it's not too late!

Latexxx
25th September 2003, 13:39
The European parliament has today accepted the new directive with some changes:
http://www2.europarl.eu.int/omk/sipade2?SAME_LEVEL=1&LEVEL=4&NAV=X&PUBREF=-//EP//TEXT+PRESS+DN-20030924-1+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN#SECTION2

Thw whole thing(with the new changes):
http://www2.europarl.eu.int/omk/sipade2?SAME_LEVEL=1&LEVEL=4&NAV=X&PUBREF=-//EP//TEXT+REPORT+A5-2003-0238+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN

Note: You can choose the language of the page from the page.

temporance
25th September 2003, 20:22
It might be a little early to crack open the champagne, but:

Quote from a slashdot posting:
Article 6a = Right to use of patented techniques, without authorisation or royalty, if needed solely to achieve software interoperability. UPHELD.This could mean (and I Am Not A Lawyer) EU users do not have to pay the MPEGLA tax for using programs like xvid.