you mean COPYRIGHT is needed

Posted Feb 5, 2005 11:17 UTC (Sat) by raboofje (guest, #26972)
In reply to: SOFTWARE PATENTS ARE NEEDED by Smokeskull
Parent article: European software patent update

Patents are not intented to fight stealing source code - that's what Copyright is for. Stealing source code is sufficiently protected.

Patents are supposed to protect innovative ideas (not code). If you have a patent on an idea, no-one else may commercialize that idea, even if he invented it independently.

That's why patents should only be granted on non-trivial ideas for a limited period of time. Personally I basically agree that software-ideas should be patentable in some situations, but the current text allows too much misuse.