It look's like we are running out of time in the efforts to stop the patenting of software in the EU.
"The European Parliament's rapporteur Michel Rocard has published his views on the software patent directive and outlined the direction which his amendments will take." while this is good, at the meeting where he discussed this with members of the European Council and EPO the Council and EPO were lobbying heavily to discard the good bits and water it back down to be as useless as the council's text.
Apparently there are hundreds of full-time lobbiests in Brussels representing a handful of special interests - mostly american and japanese, but 1 or 2 european mega corporations and lots of patent lawyers who know they will make a killing in the feeding frenzy once software patenting is allowed.
If you live or work in the EU you need to get your employer and customer to contact its MEP and Business Associations over this and start lobbying your own MEP. If you have already contacted your MEP, write to them again stating your support for M Rocard.
See ffii or no software patents websites for details on campaigns, who is who and why this is going to affect your livelihood and cost of living.
Somewhere I saw an article that suggested that patenting software, as advocated by firms like Microsoft may back fire. Once you have software patents lots of people will target rich firms like Microsoft and go digging for money, and MS themselves don't have enough of a patent arsenal to hurt IBM, so may not be able to use the patents themselves.
On the whole I think patents are only good if you are a patent lawyer, they are really bad for a small player, a nightmare if you are an FOSS developer, and unless you are IBM, even the big boys will waste more money that they make.
However, as much as I am in favour of the "EU", it is as bent as a seven euro note, and does need a good dose of accountability, transparency and democracy. At least some people in the EU stood up against patents, it's a shame that their voices were drowned out by foreign money.
My cynical?
