Mud on the Patent Shoes

So, The Council of Ministers of the EU decided to press on with the unifying legislation for patenting even though the Parliament wanted the process restarted and all for technical reasons. The technical reasons being that the current state of affairs is untidy.

Ah well, I've generally found that a too neat state of affairs, especially in areas of standards and bueaucracy, that the people that lose out are those that produce and those that consume.

The Patents laws are bad, they're bad because they allow ideas that are not in themselves functional methods embodied in some physical product to be locked away and others prevented from using them. Software is not a patentable process, any of the methods used are implicit in the existence of software, one might as well legislate for novel methods of using water.