Bonum Certa Men Certa

Peer to Patent in the UK Does Not Help the Ending of Software Patents

Protest



Summary: Another word of caution about the "Peer to Patent" effort in the United Kingdom

When the initiative known as "Peer to Patent" just stayed in the United States (the origin country) it did not make too much sense as the approach was not eliminating software patents; it ended up managing to legitimise them, or at least some of them (which it failed to stop or simply overlooked). According to this, we continue to see more evidence that the initiative spreading to the UK is not helping much [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. "The UK Intellectual Property Office has launched a pilot scheme to collect comments over the Internet on patent applications before they are granted," says an official site.



"Peer to Patent belongs to a different strand with a different goal, funded largely by IBM (at least at the moment), a software patents proponent."To quote one person from Twitter, Gérald Sédrati-Dinet, Peer to Patent allegedly "admits to allow #swpat when information is transferred more efficiently between processor and memory http://ur1.ca/4wbps"

We have written about this initiative many times before and based on what we see it still cannot be supported by abolishment proponents. In fact, unless it gets renamed "Peer NOT to Patent", it will stay incompatible with the goal of groups like the FFII. Peer to Patent belongs to a different strand with a different goal, funded largely by IBM (at least at the moment), a software patents proponent.

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