[linux-audio-dev] EU software patents?

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