This page (https://listas.sindominio.net/pipermail/hacklab-leioa/2005-May/007567.html) explains it: “patentes de corso” were licenses to murder and pillage that states granted pirates so that they could carry out their activities with impunity under certain conditions that would be beneficial for both.
The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, http://www.ffii.org/, is ‘the’ source of info about patents. But you can always go on reading here…
Most of the following material comes from this list, [href=”https://listas.sindominio.net/pipermail/hacklab-leioa] about patents on software ideas, although I’m sure that the most important information has already been put it here, http://metabolik.hacklabs.org/alephandria/
Stallman said during his talk in London that the most remarkable consequence of patents is that fewer software programs are written, so the most affected agent is the end user.
There have been attempts to explain this process on the list of the metabolik project, in Spanish, and in the radio programs I have made, there have been attempts to explain the process.
This process goes from self-censorship to courts. The companies or people who cannot afford certain luxuries will censor themselves in order to not infringe patents.
If they don’t do this, the company that has filed the patents that these people infringe will consider if it is worth the trouble to sue them for their money or to stop their programming activities.
In the U.S.A. patents, and not only on software, are already functioning; in practice, companies are taking several courses of action.
One is to insure themselves against the chance of being sued for infringement of patents. More common is to get into a patenting race as a way of defence. It happens that no matter how stupid [=with very slim possibilities of being successful] a court demand is, it is a lot cheaper to negotiate and settle out of court. But to negotiate it is necessary to have something to offer in exchange. So companies exchange the right to use something that they have patented.
Most of this material now comes from moe:
According to this article, http://alufis35.uv.es/spip/article51.html:
A patent is the formal legal legitimation for the explotation of a certain resource. In fact it is a restricted model of commercial monopoly.
With software, what happens is that programs are made of algorithms, and algorithms are ideas in mathematical language. So what we are talking about is patenting ideas. For example, a company patents the idea for a computer program that codifies moving images. Somebody that does not have the resources to research which ideas have been patented and which haven’t, develops a program to codify moving images. The company that patented that idea comes and demands this programmer to pay the corresponding fee for using a patented idea – with a sanction for using it without permission. If s/he can not pay fees plus sanction, the program that this programmer was developing is legally the property of the company that patented the idea to make the software.
There is a “patents office” in Europe, the European Patent Office (http://www.european-patent-office.org) that is not even a European official instance, but it is what companies are using already to patent ideas on software and other things. These patents do not have validity at the moment, and the companies are just waiting for Parliament to approve the setting up process to be able to execute them.
In fact there are already around 15,000 patents on computer programs, – approximately 75% of them correspond to big non-European software companies. These companies are, in fact, trying to impose the economic and legal system of the U.S.A., where the freedom of communication, of access to the information, etc, are rather more limited than here.
This article from El Mundo explains quite well… http://www.el-mundo.es/navegante/2000/10/19/razones.html
There is this pdf with good tips on how to write to European Members of Parliament; http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/docs/050124guide.pdf
Here there is an explanation of the parliamentary process , http://wiki.ffii.org/Amends05En
And to have a bbc balance that the bbc would be envious of, here are some infos with connections to people who agree with patents,
http://elastico.net/archives/2005/05/los_caballeros.html
This pdf is good documentation for this, and it is in English 😉 : http://www.libroblanco.com/document/ATI_patentes.pdf
