Re: [Fsfe-uk] BBC report on patent pirates

[Richard Smedley]

On Fri, 2004-09-24 at 00:59, MJ Ray wrote:
> Ted Harding described a recent BBC Radio 4 broadcast about the danger 
> of US patent bad habits coming to the EU. Software patents were 
> mentioned, but it's not central to the story. 

The EU spokesman on the show misleadingly stated that the EU 
were clarifying things by only allowing patents for specific
inventions in software, not general cases.

There was no opposing pov. Unfortunately the show was on
while I was waiting for the BT engineer to put my `phone
line back up, so I was unable to e-mail the show (``You
and Yours'' is live, and responds to listener response
during the show).

> Read the message at 
> http://lists.alug.org.uk/main/2004-September/019655.html - I don't 
> think you can "listen again" with free software, can you?

Not yet :-(
I'm hoping that the BBC will realise the contradiction
between developing free codecs, and not using them - however
this hope has no grounding in objective reality :-/

 - Richard