http://swpat.ffii.org/

For the last few years the European Patent Office (EPO) has, contrary to the letter and spirit of the existing law, granted more than 30000 patents on computer-implemented rules of organisation and calculation (programs for computers). Now Europe's patent movement is pressing to consolidate this practise by writing a new law. This is a huge risk for all of us - yet more control and "ownership" and less free space!

This is being discussed in the european partliament on 23 Sept.

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on patents:

If Haydn had patented "a symphony, characterised by that sound is produced [ in extended sonata form ]", Mozart would have been in trouble.

Unlike copyright, patents can block independent creations. Software patents can render software copyright useless. One copyrighted work can be covered by hundreds of patents of which the author doesn't even know but for whose infringement he and his users can be sued. Some of these patents may be impossible to work around, because they are broad or because they are part of communication standards.

Advances in software are advances in abstraction. While traditional patents were for concrete and physical inventions, software patents cover ideas. Instead of patenting a specific mousetrap, you patent any "means of trapping mammals" or "means of trapping data in an emulated environment". The fact that the universal logic device called "computer" is used for this does not constitute a limitation. When software is patentable, anything is patentable.

In most countries, software has, like mathematics and other abstract subject matter, been explicitely considered to be outside the scope of patentable inventions. However these rules were broken one or another way. The patent system has gone out of control. A closed community of patent lawyers is creating, breaking and rewriting its own rules without much supervision from the outside.

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The Proposal for a software patent directive, which will be submitted to the European Parliament for decision on September 24th, is giving rise to yet another wave of protests. These include a conference in Brussels on Wednesday September 17th, a rally in Strasbourg on Tuesday September 23nd, as well as a series of "satellite demos" in other cities of Europe. These actions will be accompanied by an Internet Strike on the 17th and 23rd. At a comparable action on Aug 27, 500 demonstrators came to Brussels and 3000 websites went on strike.


some ideas on what you can do about it:
 http://swpat.ffii.org/group/todo/index.en.html