panosalevropoulos

On 1 June 2023, the Unified Patent Court and the unitary patent were entered into force. Simply put, this means that we will soon have software patents in Europe that are effective automatically in the entire European Union.

Hardly anyone talks about this, but it is bound to become a problem. I am currently editing relevant entries on ESP Wiki. This specific entry is about the history and dangers of harmonizing the European patent systems (spoiler alert: the EU had been trying to create such a system ever since its creation).

This is a new ESP Wiki entry explaining the situation around software patents on a new data compression algorithm.

The original author, Jarek Duda, released his work into the public domain. Despite his intentions, Big Tech companies are attempting to patent his technology around the world. In early 2022, Microsoft registered a software patent on ANS. Google tried to do the same a few years ago but failed. We can't catch them all.

The free software community is fighting an unfair battle. Megacorporations are stealing people's work by imposing unjustified patent rights. The patent offices grant software patents despite obvious existence of prior art.

See Hacker News comments.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/193809

If you are familiar with software patents and would like to moderate an excellent database of campaign material against software patents, please respond below. This post will be pinned until ESP Wiki is sufficiently moderated.

ESP Wiki was created in 2008 as the main resource for activists, programmers, lawyers, and policy makers with the goal of abolishing software patents. In the past, it has worked as a community forum for FSF's amicus briefs to courts and has been cited by legal journals and articles. Lately it has gotten some serious updates: a new logo, a modernized theme, better categorization, brand-new custom wiki templates, etc.

It is not required to have a legal background, but you should be at least comfortable with reading legal information. You should also have a general understanding of basic legal procedure around patent law. But even if you don't know much, this is a great opportunity to learn some interesting details about this topic.

Do not hesitate to contact me at any point; this post will be up for a while.

You can read more about the End Software Patents campaign in the community's description.

Links:

• End Software Patents (main page)
• ESP Wiki

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/193809

If you are familiar with software patents and would like to moderate an excellent database of campaign material against software patents, please respond below. This post will be pinned until ESP Wiki is sufficiently moderated.

ESP Wiki was created in 2008 as the main resource for activists, programmers, lawyers, and policy makers with the goal of abolishing software patents. In the past, it has worked as a community forum for FSF's amicus briefs to courts and has been cited by legal journals and articles. Lately it has gotten some serious updates: a new logo, a modernized theme, better categorization, brand-new custom wiki templates, etc.

It is not required to have a legal background, but you should be at least comfortable with reading legal information. You should also have a general understanding of basic legal procedure around patent law. But even if you don't know much, this is a great opportunity to learn some interesting details about this topic.

Do not hesitate to contact me at any point; this post will be up for a while.

You can read more about the End Software Patents campaign in the community's description.

Links:

• End Software Patents (main page)
• ESP Wiki

This is the first post on Lemmy related to ESP Wiki. I will be posting updates here from now on. Please share this site if you can. Combating software patents is very important for user freedom.

Some notes: I'm trying to make ESP Wiki a user-friendly place so that anyone can find it easy to contribute information. For this reason, I focused on creating a style guide and some neat templates. Templates are especially important because we can use them to easily mark entries that need work, so we can focus on them first.

Here is an overview of March 2022 project updates so far:

• Added content policies.
• Added a style guide.
• Created an ESP community on Lemmy (here!).
• Amended several templates, based on a new House Style warnbox.