Pelo menos por enquanto, a Europa está livre da ridícula 'catracalização' do software. Ontem a proposta de patentes de software foi recusada. Solicitaram o envio de uma nova proposta ao parlamento. Segundo o BoingBoing, se aprovada a legislação sobre patentes de software, "Europe will sink into the same quagmire as the US, where math and general purpose algorithms are the exclusive property of a few patent-squatters who produce nothing except lawsuits".

Essa autofagia em torno de IP bem que podia ser uma exclusividade estadunidense. Eles se quebrariam em 72 horas... hehe. O problema seria conviver com advogados trilionários querendo curtir vida de verdade em paraísos tupiniquins...


ATUALIZAÇÃO: A ZDNet tb trata o tema, em post com o criativo título "Rage Against the Patent Machine". Triste é o tom de conformismo que encerra o artigo:

But the bottom line is that the patent system is what it is. Today, software developers-- including IBM, Sun, and Microsoft-- answer to their shareholders before they answer to anybody else and, to put it bluntly, the patent system remains a legal avenue for maintaining or improving shareholder value. As long as there's no official discussion taking place, we should have no illusions of patent holders going beyond some of the nice gestures we have so far seen (gestures that came with no risk to shareholder value, by the way) and fully abandoning their software patent portfolios any time soon. It would be the equivalent of expecting drivers on the German autobahn to start obeying some fictitious speed limit. Yeah, right.