Dominic Tristram

Bath, UK

Programmer

While this is an ok idea, why not just make everything more simple and not allow software patents? This would include all standing patents too of course. It would be possible, despite things going the other way (like the recent European legislation). Couple this with enforced open standards for data exchange and file formats (and if they are proprietary then insist that they must be well documented and royalty-free for other people to use) will ensure that we don't end up yet again with the ridiculous situation we have today, where Word documents are considered acceptable to use for e-government even though they actually require a specific product.

Copyright law is all anyone needs for software. Patents are unjustifiable and have held the industry back needlessly.