[linux-audio-dev] EU software patents?

[Juhana Sadeharju]

Hello. Can anyone report what is going on with the EU software patents?
How they would affect immediately the audio and graphics development
we are doing? Xine? Sodipodi? Others?

Yesterday news broadcasting made not a big case how EU software
patents affects us. They were more conserned about how companies'
money escapes from research and development to the patent lawyers
when companies *have to* start patenting. (It looks like professional
politicians do not realize that nobody forces to patent anything.)
Other worry was that then big companies collects patent portfolios
and thus puts small companies to trouble. Again, no worry about
us.

It was only at evening news that one channel mentioned Linux,
but no politicians seemed to worry about Linux or us.

 -*-

I would like to propose the following: if EU gets the software
patents, then should non-profit open source community and non-profit
academic researchers get patents for free. Then we would be in
equally competitive situation. IMHO, the current patent system
discriminate us.

Patenteer for sure use anything we develop, but for sure they are
protecting even triviallest "invention".

Please, don't say we have *choosed* not to patent anything. I have
choosed not to patent only because there is no income in writing
free software. I have invented tens of non-trivial and trivial
techniques. It would have been great if the free/open source
community would have a 20 years monopoly for these techniques.
(As a non-profit institution we cannot get royalties from the
patent, right? We would use them to block commercial products
for using the techniques.)

Best regards,
Juhana