[Fsfe-uk] Questions to the last Reply from McCarthy

[Bernhard Kaindl]

Hi, sorry for coming back to Thursday, it's just a ":-)"-Mail....

On Thu, 17 Jul 2003, Hartmut Pilch wrote:

> When writing to Arlene McCarthy, please do not forget to point to the
> public letter about the 2 example patents, which I sent to her and to this
> forum.  I think she owes us an answer.
>
>       http://www.aful.org/wws/arc/patents/2003-06/msg00047.html

I think a sentence she used in her mail-reply
is interesting:

"While it is not possible to comment on whether any
patent application would be excluded from the directive, ..."

                    "... the directive, as amended, would not permit the
                         patentability of Amazon's 'one-click' method."

So how can she say *that* ;-)

For demonstrantion, I just flip the two parts of the senctence:

The directive, as amended, would not permit the patentability of
Amazon's 'one-click' method, even while it's not possible to comment
on whether any patent application would be excluded from the directive.

Either she can comment or not.... :-)
Bernhard
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PS: I would have (up to) three quesions to McCarthy:

Quoting from her reply
http://lists.ffii.org/archive/mails/swpat/2003/Jul/0045.html
I would reply back:

> As far as software itself is concerned, it will not be possible to patent a
> software product. Software itself will continue to be able to be protected by
> copyright.

How is assured that the EPO stops granting patents for software per se?

> With an EU directive, legislators will have scrutiny over the EPO and national
> court's decisions.

And which legislators will be autorized to stop the EPO from granting patents
on pure software?

Thanks for answering these curical questions,
....

What about collecting some more simple questions like these (the questions
should be really one-sentce, nothing you need to be an expert to understand)
and ask a newspaper/news site to run a interview with them?
(I would be happy to try to contribute more questions like these)
((Of course it would be better to test her answers one by one before))