Fitting in with the topic of patents and copyright etc, I thought I'd briefly mention that there is a similar proposal under way in the US about patenting software.

Paraphrasing from the linked article, the US system requires that the patentable piece of software must "simply be within the technological arts" and "no specific technological contribution is needed"

Thats more than a little scary to me.

Fortunately the EU have just rejected this as, fortunately, the powers that be got some advisers in and actually listened. I certainly hope that it gets reconsidered in the US.

Not coming from the US I don't know as much about it as I would like but I do feel the sentiments expressed in this thread so far certainly apply.

For more info see here

I was concerned that the US policy was going to be blanket across Europe and I'm glad this was not the case.

---

---

• Are you posting in the right place? Check out Where do I post X? to know for sure.
• Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags. Currently these include the following:

  <code> <a> <b> <big> <blockquote> <br /> <dd> <dl> <dt> <em> <font> <h1> <h2> <h3> <h4> <h5> <h6> <hr /> <i> <li> <nbsp> <ol> <p> <small> <strike> <strong> <sub> <sup> <table> <td> <th> <tr> <tt> <u> <ul>

• Snippets of code should be wrapped in <code> tags not <pre> tags. In fact, <pre> tags should generally be avoided. If they must be used, extreme care should be taken to ensure that their contents do not have long lines (<70 chars), in order to prevent horizontal scrolling (and possible janitor intervention).
• Want more info? How to link or How to display code and escape characters are good places to start.