[Sigia-l] Software Patents and IA?

[Jonathan Baker-Bates]

Along with Britain winning the Olympic bid today, some other news also
broke: The EU has struck down proposed software patents legislation
after the largest lobbying campaign in its history. Although it's still
up to national legislature's to decide what's patentable or not, it's
effectively dead in Europe for the foreseeable future:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/07/06/eu_bins_swpat/

This reminded me of a question I've been meaning to ask the list: do any
of you who work in countries like the US, where software patents are
legal and often enforced, find it affects your work? Almost the
canonical example of this now is Amazon's "one-click ordering" patent
for e-commerce websites. But there are thousands of others I believe.

Do you need to be wary of coming up with an idea that might be found to
infringe a patent? I'm kinda assuming it doesn't, since I've not seen
anything on the list relating to the issue, but I was just curious.

Jonathan




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Jonathan Baker-Bates  |  Experience Architect  |  Oyster Partners

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