Battleangel

India is fast turning into one of the world’s development powerhouses, and they’re getting there by challenging the idea that they should have western-style copyright and patent rules (the US spent its first century as a “pirate nation” that didn’t honor foreign copyrights and patents). This marks a decisive moment in Indian history: the US, Europe, and other nations’ IT industries are crippled by the need to pay monopoly rents to patent-crooks like Acacia; India’s IT companies can get away scott-free.

Source: Boing Boing

So much for Microsoft filing patents in India. One Slashdot reader adds that we are outsourcing freedom. And here is something else really interesting from Slashdot:

Fantastic! Just yesterday I read that Ericsson [nyteknik.se] has started to threaten the Swedish government that research and development will be moved out of Europe to countries that “respect software patents” (the spokesman mentions Japan and the US).

Re:Fantastic! This sounds like pure bullying. Ericsson has NOTHING to gain in the area of protecting their software by moving to the US or Japan. You have to apply for patents in countries where you wish to RELEASE your product, not where you DEVELOP your products. So if Ericsson wishes to release products in both the US and Sweden, they have to apply for patents in both places, whether they have their factory located in the US or in Sweden. Actually, they run a higher risk in the US, because in the US a competitor might attempt to close them down because they are (alledgedly) infringing on one of the competitor’s patents, while, without software patents in Sweden, in Sweden they wouldn’t run any risk at all.

For the record it should be noted that, like Germany for instance, Japan only allows software patents that are “a creation of technical ideas utilizing a law of nature.”