A clicking bomb (Economist) [LWN.net]

The Economist covers the software patent fight in Europe. "Now, although many patents are centrally awarded by the European Patent Office (EPO) in Munich, national courts have the final say over a patent's validity. In Britain, business methods are generally not patentable, but they can sometimes be patented in Germany. The EPO, by the way, granted Amazon a patent in May covering computerised methods of delivering gifts to third parties, a descendant of its one-click patent in America."

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A clicking bomb (Economist)

Posted Sep 5, 2003 4:45 UTC (Fri) by dwalters (guest, #4207) [Link]

I thought that this Economist article was a reasonably accurate overall appraisal, for the most part, of the current state of afairs in the European patent fight.

Harmonization is good. Nobody wants the current situation where the European Patent Office (EPO) grants a patent, and then some countries strike it down as illegal, and other countries allow it.

What many of us would also like, though, is to make it harder or impossible for the EPO to grant patents on software. Just take a look at this European Software Patent Horror Gallery, a small, randomly chosen sample of the 30,000 or so patents that have been granted by the EPO already. This list will be shocking to most of the readers of LWN.

Arlene McCarthy's proposal, she claims, would make some of these patents more difficult to grant in the future. This may be true. However, this is not good enough. The FFII's Counter Proposal, on the other hand, would serve to harmonize patent law throughout Europe in such a way that software patents would be illegal, and could not be granted by the EPO. This counter proposal is what we should be pushing for right now, with everything we've got.

delivering gifts to third parties

Posted Sep 5, 2003 13:42 UTC (Fri) by dneto (guest, #4954) [Link]

Just a comment on that second Amazon patent: a computerized method for delivering gifts to third parties.

During the .com boom years I worked at an "information logistics" company, integrating supply chain operations across companies. One of the concepts I learned there was that of a "drop ship". Customer A buys a package of stuff (e.g. computer, monitor, printer) from a supplier B. B doesn't have everything on hand, so the send the stuff they do have (e.g. computer, monitor) and then arrange for the manufacturer C to send the printer directly to the customer A. That last bit is called a "drop ship": B acts essentially as a broker handling the money aspect. C just delivers the goods though they didn't handle the purchase order.

Oh, and they almost always do it by computer messages (e.g. EDI document exchange or other means).

It's kind of cool, but also as old as supply chains themselves. How on earth did Amazon get a patent for that?

ugh

A clicking bomb (Economist)

Posted Sep 8, 2003 17:21 UTC (Mon) by jdthood (guest, #4157) [Link]

The second to last paragraph of the Economist article:
> Arlene McCarthy, the rapporteur of the European Parliament's
> committee for legal affairs and the internal market, has now
> proposed an additional test for patentability: an invention
> must teach a new way to use controllable forces of nature
> (really) and have an industrial application. This aims to
> strengthen the exclusion of pure software and business methods.

If this is true then it is a significant shift in McCarthy's position.
Earlier she was refusing to accept any amendments. Such reference
to controllable forces of nature is favored by the FFII.