Hi everybody,

I know Microsoft wants softwarepatents in Europe, but Microsoft is not the only company, is it? Does anyone know which other companies are trying to get software patents legal in Eurpe? I can't find it on the www.

Thanks

Moved: This thread is more suitable in General and has been moved accordingly to help your thread/question get the exposure it deserves.

Software patents are much better then Copyrights IMO well in the US anyways. Do you know copyrights now last for 97 years? Patents last only a fraction of that time.

That's not really the issue. Patents and copyrights don't cover the same things.
If you write a word-processor, and have a copyright on it, someone will have the right to produce a better product based on the same idea, as long as no code is stollen.
But if you have a patent on it, no one will have the right to make a word-processor, as long as the patents is valid.

Imagine if Microsoft had placed a patent on Word 2 for DOS! And on Windows 2!
Then no WordPerfect (which was the first to challenge Word) nor OpenOffice... And no Linux of course.

If Apple had patented it's userinterface there wasn't even a windows, but that's not my question. My question was which other companies are trying to get software patents in Europe, because Microsoft is always considered the big enemy...

PS software patents in Europe are considered a big thread to open source: they recently discovered the linuxkernel infringes 287 patents, of which 25 or so belong to microsoft. I don't know if US software patents are different, but what do you think of the NON-US disk of Debian? It's the normal installation disk, minus some software that is illegal in the US, but not in the rest of the world? Is that because of software patents?

PS2 XavierP, I'm sure I put this topic in general. From which forum did it come?

Oh, I'm also getting off topic. Painfull topic...