Intellectual property Toolkit

Story: Linux users could face European patent threat

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It's not as cut and dried as all that

But, as the story says, we do "do" software patents. There are loopholes and companies have got some patents through these that effectively patent software products, so there are software patents in force here.

Statistically, given how few there are, I reckon it's highly unlikely that the few many (any?) of the set of 235 are in force in the UK.

And as someone else has pointed out, Microsoft has obvious problems with acting on the supposed infringements, since it would involve revealing the patents involved, and thereby ensuring that the open source community finds prior art or engineers round it.

It's a largely empty threat, yes, and one which is even less applicable in the UK than the US. But there is slightly more threat than we wrote last week.

In practice, I'd say we can probably ignore the threat here - but as one person said - it only takes one patent to make a case.

Peter Judge

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