Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-07-05-Speech-2-034"
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"en.20050705.6.2-034"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, over and above the official statements, a change has been added to Article 2 allowing patent protection to also include the software contained in a computer.
That opens the door to the patentability of software. It is as though it were possible one day to patent scales, notes and chords. It is as though the pentatonic scale were patented, as a result of which all of a sudden a large proportion of blues music would be in violation of such a patent and all writers would have to pay royalties to whomever had registered it.
Patents have already been requested for ideas that are not new, such as the mouse click to carry out a command or the inequality operator in open source software, and for other unoriginal ideas that are today used in practically every software package in circulation.
Furthermore, if interoperability were to be obstructed by patents on programs and consumers were forced in all cases to only purchase and use products made by the same company, there would be huge consequences, mainly of an economic nature. No company must be able to build a monopoly through patented software. A small business would find itself having to sustain enormous expenses, on the one hand in order not to carry out any violation of the patent, and, on the other hand, to defend its own actions in court. Competition would therefore no longer just be a market issue, but would also become a legal issue.
Let us think about all of the university and hospital research institutes that today, thanks to the absence of this directive, carry out research by saving on software because they use programs devised by the institutes themselves, and which are therefore free of charge, or alternative software costing much less than Microsoft products. Without patents on software, Europe could keep costs low, stimulate innovation, improve security and create employment.
To the title of the
‘Patents are smart bombs’, I would add ‘against the prospect of enabling the future interaction of different cultures and worlds’."@en1
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"Harvard Business Review"1
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