On Saturday 10 April 2004 11.51, you wrote: > To me, the easiest course would be to issue seperate copyright and > patent licences which do not interact. We could then considers them > individually without playing "hunt the interaction" and people in > swpat-free areas (including Sweden for now?) may be able to ignore > the swpat one.
Law and practice has differed for many years, so we have had software patents in Sweden and EU for a long time. Or, to be more correct, the European law has allowed software patents for a long time if it is interpreted the way the patent industry has done, that is you cannot patent software as such, but software which runs on a computer and actually performs something forms a unity which is patentable. That is, if you use your source code for decorating cakes you cannot patent that software, but if you strangely enough run it on a computer, you have something that is patentable. Currently, the EU is working on making the law clearer, that is expressively allow or disallow software patents. No-one knows yet what the end result will be (if I would guess, most likely something along the lines of American patent law, since that is the best for the patent industry, and they have the strongest lobbyists). /Anders Torger
