Direct download as Ogg (00:01:11, 3.8 MB)

Summary: Dr. Richard Stallman, the Free Software Foundation's founder, offers his analysis of the Unitary Patent (or UPC) and what it means for software patents in Europe now that the EPO increases its influence over continental law

3.8M

[00:00]

(intro music)

Roy: Here we've got this thing called the Unitary Patent. Do you know about the ...

RMS: I know a lot about the Unitary Patent and I known that there's a danger it would turn out to be a sneaky way to legitimize software patents.

Roy: Yes.

RMS: Because in the fine print of the deal for the Unitary Patent it says that the policy decisions of the European

[00:30]

Patent Office will govern all appeals against the decisions of the European Patent Office, which makes the European Patent Office autonomous, totally out of democratic control, and allowed to wreak havoc on whatever fields it chooses to. We know it wants software patents. It wants to put patents on computing ideas, because it has already issued patents on computing ideas.

Roy: Yeah.

RMS: So he question is can this be

[01:00]

stopped?