Tels wrote:
On Tuesday 12 July 2005 23:00, Michael G Schwern wrote:
Barbie's journal, via Ovid, made me aware of patent EP1170667
"Software
Package Verification" granted last month in the EU.
http://gauss.ffii.org/PatentView/EP1170667
It appears to patent basic software testing frameworks.
This entire patent system is becoming so silly. :-(
For what it is worth, this patent would be not legal/not enforcable in
Germany due to be "software only". (It would also probably not quality
on
grounds of being obvious, I fail to see what is so patent-worthy on
this
patent. Even I could have come up with a testsystem.)
As for the rest of the EU, software-only patents are very probably not
enforcable, anyway. (Although I lost track over how the issue now
really
is, the last thing I heard there was a victory for the
no-software-patent
crowd (yeah!), but then maybe it just cemented the status quo (namely,
everything under the sun gets patented left/right).
Indeed, there was a great victory for the no-software-patent side, as
the EP massively voted against software patents (648 against, 14 for,
18 nulls). See FFII press releases:
http://wiki.ffii.org/Ep050706En
http://wiki.ffii.org/SpinPr050708En
What this means is that, at the European level, we're back to the statu
quo which is: software isn't a technology, therefore it is no
patentable (Munich Convention of 1973, confirmed by article 27.1 of
TRIPS).
Consequence is that the currently 30,000 patents granted by EPO are not
legal, hence not enforceable.
Of course, IANAL, but that's what MEP and people who actually reading
the texts say.
Sébastien Aperghis-Tramoni
-- - --- -- - -- - --- -- - --- -- - --[ http://maddingue.org ]
Close the world, txEn eht nepO
