We're Going to Focus Less on the Molotov Cocktail-Throwing Microsofters and More on Patents
To use a metaphor (no, we are not suggesting that Microsoft has people throwing bottles with flammable substances such as petrol, alcohol or a napalm-like mixture into my home), it's time for us to spend less time on the "guns for hire" and swatting by militants and instead focus/divert more time and energy to EPO affairs, including why software patents are so bad. António Campinos and the kangaroo courts have made progress on importing such patents into Europe, of course by illegal means. Someone suggested that we cover how this impacts Turkey, which is in the EPO (or EPC to be more precise) but not in the EU. As we showed some years ago, Turkey played a considerable role in enabling EPO corruption and businesses in Turkey will suffer for it. They can be sued with European Patents and the illegal patent courts of the EU will try to extend the scope of their rulings beyond the EU (UK, Switzerland, Norway, Turkey). Never mind if 1) those courts are not constitutional and 2) those countries are not in the EU.
We were also reminded of what Dan Bricklin wrote in 1999 about "Patents and Software". "Have things changed back enough that his views are now outdated?" asked a reader. Quoting the latest from Bricklin, "I also feel that no matter how much you might feel that patents don't work for the software industry, and how much you may take up the torch to change the law, it is the law today and a fact of programming life as much as Microsoft, the instruction set of the machine we write for, the turning of the century number, and the need to pay for food. Ignoring them won't make them go away, nor protect you from those that do not have the same beliefs."
That was a long time ago. I was still in school. What he says is still very much relevant and also unsolved. We want to start devoting more time to coverage of patents, seeing that the Microsofters lost any remnants of momentum after we had filed our third lawsuit (after two lawsuits that we lodged last year [1, 2]). The SLAPPs are basically deadlocked at this point. We can get back to focusing on what we wanted to focus on all along. █