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EuroLinux
Congratulates British Telecom EuroLinux Alliance
For immediate Release Metz, Munich and Paris, 21/6/2000 - The Eurolinux Alliance of European commercial software publishers and non-profit associations has published an open letter and congratulates British Telecom for providing the world with a brilliant proof of the absurdity of software patents. British Telecom, which owns a US patent on Web hyperlinks (US4873662, "Information handling system and terminal apparatus therefor") has apparently decided to sue all Internet Service Providers in the United States for infringement on their patent. To ensure that similar absurd disputes do not happen in Europe in the near future, and to save software innovation in Europe, EuroLinux urges all businesses and citizens in Europe to sign its Campaign for a Software Patent Free Europe which already collected 6000 signatures in 5 days. BT's move gives a brilliant overview of the great dangers of Software Patents in the information society:
BT's move also shows the absurdity of the software patent system as it stands in the US. BT was granted its patent nearly 15 years ago for a software concept which may have seemed new and inventive at the time. But such a patent, by being so abstract and general, has actually given BT the right to strangle the development of the World Wide Web and a lot of related technologies, which owe nothing to the inventive effort of BT. Even BT themselves took more than 10 years to discover that the scope of their own patent included Hyperlinks on the Web. Europe is currently protected against this absurdity because the European Patent Law prohibits granting patents on pure programmes. However, thousands of Internet software patents, just as absurd as BT's one, are waiting at the European Patent Office for a change in the European Patent Law which will likely make them fully enforceable in Europe within 6 months. In particular, the European Commission, under pressure of the United States, is currently pushing European governments to change their patent Law and legalise software patents within six months. As a result, most European Web startup companies may then become, knowingly or not, infringers for patents on software techniques such as: publishing a database on the Web, one-click (Amazon), affiliate programmes (Amazon), HTML Style Sheets (Microsoft), P3P privacy (Intermind), WAP (GeoWorks), Web-page Downloading (Sony), Embedded Hypermedia, Error Handling (MCI), Web Advertising (Double Click, Inc.), Selling Airline Tickets (Priceline), Web User Tracking (Across Sites Infonautics), E-commerce Tracking, Shopping Cart, E-commerce Sales, etc. Says Jean-Paul Smets, speaking for the EuroLinux Alliance, "Current plans in Europe to legalise software patents are just the beginning of another round of patent inflation. Recent rulings at the European Patent Office show that it is already possible to get patents for services, human actions, intellectual methods, etc. The time has come to take control of the European Patent System out of the hands of patent experts and back into the hands of the general interest." ReferencesAn Open Letter to BT -
http://petition.eurolinux.org/bt/thankyou.html
About EuroLinux - www.eurolinux.orgThe EuroLinux Alliance for a Free Information Infrastructure is an open coalition of commercial companies and non-profit associations united to promote and protect a vigourous European Software Culture based on Open Standards, Open Competition, Linux and Open Source Software. Companies members or supporters of EuroLinux develop or sell software under free, semi-free and non-free licenses for operating systems such as Linux, MacOS or Windows. The EuroLinux Alliance has co-organised in 1999, together with the French Embassy in Japan, the first Europe-Japan conference on Linux and Free Software. The EuroLinux Alliance is at the initiative of the www.freepatents.org web site to promote and protect innovation and competition in the European IT industry. Press Contacts France & Europe: Stéfane Fermigier sf@fermigier.com +33-6 63 04 12
77 Permanent URL for this PR http://petition.eurolinux.org/pr/pr2.html LegaleseLinux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. |
Thank
You BT!