As Europe Gets Increasingly Serious About Software Freedom and Digital Sovereignty It Needs to Enforce a Ban on Software Patents ASAP
Looking back 2+ decades, based on official texts, the corrupt EPO effectively 'defeated' the law. 2 decades later it issued patently illegal policies for approving loads of European software patents - i.e. patents which are both illegal and undesirable. Since there is no oversight, the EPO can break the law all it wants and even use its kangaroo courts to issue decisions affirming its actions.
From the old text:
One conclusion which can be drawn unquestionably from the responses is that there is a clear demand for action. The present situation in which there is lack of clarity as to the limits of what is patentable is seen as an important negative influence on the industry. However as to precisely what action should be taken, opinions were sharply divided between those who wish to see strict limits on software-related patents (or a complete ban) and those who support harmonisation at the level of more or less the status quo as defined by the current practice and jurisprudence of the EPO.The individual responses were dominated by supporters of open source software, whose views ranged from wanting no patents for software at all to the "official" position of the Eurolinux Alliance which is to oppose patents for software running on general-purpose computers. On the other hand, submissions broadly in support of the approach of the consultation paper tended to come from regional or sectoral organisations representing large numbers of companies of all sizes, such as UNICE, the Union of Industrial and Employer's Confederations of Europe, EICTA, the European Information and Communications Technology Industry Association, and the European IT Services Association. There were also individual large organizations, other industry associations and IP professionals. Thus although the responses in this category were numerically much fewer that those supporting the open source approach, there seems little doubt that the balance of economic weight taking into account total jobs and investment involved is in favour of harmonisation along the lines suggested in the paper.
An associate has explained that "the gist seems to be that the opposition to software patents is mainly from the FOSS communities and therefore economically irrelevant and therefore should be ignored; the obvious rebuttal is to point to the tremendous economic value FOSS has for European nations."
More so now that many councils in Europe move to Free software and US policy/companies cannot be trusted. When it comes to harmonisation - what they mean by this term is inheriting US laws here in the European nations. They simply assume that whatever powerful corporations and plutocrats in the US want should also be adopted in Europe and then enforced using kangaroo courts which are illegal and unconstitutional. This is a long topic, we've been rightly reminded, but it is one that we covered here many times in our earlier years as a site. █