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Story: European Parliament blocks patent liberalisation
Posted by: Arthur B. (Monday 20 March 2006, 11:48 PM)
One must be very poorly informed today to even consider software patents at the EU level.
The only way to put a stop to all that lobbying, conflict of interests and the rest is to ban software patents all together for the next 50 years or so.
Sure, innovation, R&D investments and such must be protected. But they are better protected by booting out all that self interest backed up by huge funds then allowing even the smallest of foot between the door.
There's also something else to consider. Software patents will only work if the entire world follows the same rules. That won't happen so what then? How much R&D budget is really needed to come up with low costing solutions that can match themselves with the far more sponsored commercial solutions out there? So how much protection is really needed? And for what? Inflated self interest? Laywer fees? That's burocratic. Not technical innovation. Such innovation is so fast moving forward that being the first is a tremendous advantage in itself. To try to copycat that would take longer and cost more then simply going into a legal agreement with the inventor. So perhaps we need to concentrate on how fast we can get good ideas to spread worldwide and making it difficult to stop that spread by those who happen to have more power at that point in time.
We life in a world were a technical software innovation can be put to use in minutes. So non-burocratic technical innovation can take over the world very quickly indeed. Yet we believe that if we go burocratic on that we would actually improve on things?
Patent countries against non-patent countries?
Guess who will have the fastest moving and most flexible market. The rest will be tied down in legal and political discussions.
A few years ago this whole patent thing could have been ended with a single word: NO.
We didn't and mostly what we have today is endless discussions based mostly on FUD. Little facts, plenty of emotions, not very innovative.
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