Long-time Slashdot reader zoobab shares this update about the long-standing Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, a Munich-based non-profit opposing ratification of a “Unified Patent Court” by Germany: The FFII is crowdfunding a constitutional complaint in Germany against the third attempt to impose software patents in Europe, calling on all software companies, independent software developers and FLOSS authors to donate.
The Unitary Patent and its Court will promote patent trolls, without any appeal possible to the European Court of Justice, which won’t be able to rule on patent law, and software patents in particular. The FFII also says that the proposed court system will be more expensive for small companies then the current national court system.
The stakes are high — so the FFII writes that they’re anticipating some tricky counter-maneuvering: Stopping the UPC in Germany will be enough to kill the UPC for the whole Europe… German government believe that they can ratify before the end of the year, as they consider the UK still a member of the EU till 31st December. The agenda of next votes have been designed on purpose to ratify the UPC before the end of the year. FFII expects dirty agenda and political hacks to declare the treaty “into force”, dismiss “constitutional complaints”, while the presence of UK is still problematic.
Source: ‘Save Europe from Software Patents’, Urges Nonprofit FFII – Slashdot
These have been batted off the table before and for very good reason.
Robin Edgar
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