Summary: Jonathan Zuck's fake lobby for Microsoft (AstroTurf) is getting its wishes for Community patent almost fulfilled after persistent perversion of the European system

A MICROSOFT lobby group known as Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) is celebrating the recent patent developments in Europe which may help Microsoft illegalise Free software rather than compete against it. ACT has been aggressively lobbying for it since 2008 (if not much earlier) and we have many documented examples. From its shameless lobby blog:

After several rounds of negotiations, the Swedish Presidency announced last week that the EU Patent System was one step closer.

Yes, it celebrates this, for obvious reasons. It is bad for small businesses, but good for ACT's client. ACT also attended the most recent event in Europe where these matters were discussed; as usual, Zuck was pretending to represent small businesses.

In a new article from LWN.net, this look forward at 2010 reveals software patents as a key peril:

Software patents will strike close to home again. Nokia's suit against Apple is an especially ominous development. We are seeing the opening of a whole new computing market where none of the traditionally dominating companies have a commanding share. So it's a bit of a gold rush, and some companies will undoubtedly rush to gain their gold by way of the courts.

The case of Apple and Nokia is one that we've covered in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. Against Monopoly has this Dilbert cartoon about the subject. ⬆