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Comment by acqq | Hacker News Reader

I think you missed the point, it's issuing and enforcing the software patents that is bad for anybody but the biggest companies.

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I'm sorry, how is that different from what I wrote? Did I somehow imply that patents are "good" for any one of us? I don't think so, but then again I'm not a native English speaker.

If clarification is needed, I'm a firm believer of "information must be free". I think we could agree that giving the right to lawyers to make profits out of decent people's work and ideas is not part of that. :)

In my opinion the main problem that EU regulations brought to Europe is exactly that it's now much easier for big companies to push through new laws which are good only for the mentioned big companies and which then get applied by all the members.

And sorry, I falsely understood that you believed that the easer issuing of patents which is probably coming in EU is what's "better" in EU than in US. Now I've read more carefully -- I'm the one who overlook the "but" in your sentence.

> In my opinion the main problem that EU regulations brought to Europe is exactly that it's now much easier for big companies to push through new laws which are good only for the mentioned big companies and which then get applied by all the members.

Any specific examples of this?

I live in Europe and the press is here full of such examples. Before, the corporations had to lobby the politicians of every state and some things would simply never get through as the attempts would induce reactions from opposition and the media attention. Now corporations simply lobby the bureaucratized "representatives" decisions of who are almost never covered by media -- cheaper, simpler, and almost always works. Try discovering how GM food got allowed in EU.

I'm European too and I haven't seen the many examples in the press that you refer to. In fact the EU seems to be relatively good at resisting laws pushed through by big businesses compared to, say, the US.

From what I remember, GM food was allowed in the EU because there wasn't sufficient reason to disallow it. Not that there wasn't lobbying pressure on both sides, of course, but those in favour were mainly from farming lobbying groups who wanted to grow it.

Software patents often harm the really big companies too, due to the existence of patent trolling companies which exist for no other reason than to horde patents and sue big companies.

As an engineer, I'm offended by the fact that some lawyer has control over the types product I can design. We keep on hearing how patents harm innovation, now hopefully something is done about it.

Actually this helps big companies. They can afford to pay off the trolls and continue but bogus patents can kill off their smaller competitors who don't have money for lawsuits.

That's why Microsoft, for example, pays off billions in patent lawsuit winnings and then hires expansive lobbyists to keep them coming. It's peanuts to big companies but the freedom from upstart competition they get is priceless.

If a patent is transferrable in some form, and has some value, then there will be a market for it - one can hardly fault someone for exploiting this to commercial advantage.

The patent system itself is broken..... let's fix that...

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