Software Patents in Western Europe
Introduction
The world is becoming smaller and smaller. It’s a catch-line cliché anyone who is familiar with the internet has heard a thousand times. Email provides nearly instant communication across the globe, massive files containing every imaginable piece of information are transmitted in the blink of an eye, and the World Wide Web makes it all accessible to the common individual with moderate computer skills. There is no denying it, just like the IBM slogan, the internet has changed the way the world does business.
One key to doing business is the patent. Meant to reward and encourage innovation, the patent gives the creator of an idea or invention a temporary monopoly on their product. This grants small businesses a foothold in a market that would otherwise be dominated by giant corporations. Thus patents give life to competition, the cornerstone of capitalism. However, with the advent of the computer industry the issue of patenting software programs has become an intense debate. These intangible sequences of ones and zeros are coveted like gold and in some cases are the very livelihood of numerous businesses.
The State of Affairs in Western Europe
There are two camps in Europe battling out the issue of software patents. On one side we have “Brussels technocrats and technology giants such as Microsoft, SAP, and Nokia, all of which insist that Europe must do more to protect intellectual property or risk compromising its global competitiveness.”1 The basic argument of this side is that patents are necessary if Europe wants to compete with U.S. and Chinese innovation. On the other side of the debate there is “an army of economists, left-leaning politicians, and programmers such as Linux creator Linus Torvalds”1 who present the argument that “software patents are a creativity-crushing weapon wielded by multinationals to bash [startups].”1 The open-source community, which produces software without patents for all people to use, is particularly strong in Europe. It is their opinion that software patents put programs under lock and key and they would like to see Europe reject software patents completely.
For the past two years the European Union has been working to stiffen its existing patent laws while balancing the sometimes conflicting requirements of its 15 members. However, the process was upended in September when “the European Parliament -- under heavy last-minute lobbying by open-source advocates -- unexpectedly approved a draft law that effectively banned all software patents.
The history of The Black Civil Rights Movement in the United States is a fascinating account of a group of human beings, forcibly taken from their homeland, brought to a strange new continent, and forced to endure countless inhuman atrocities. Forced into a life of involuntary servitude to white slave owners, African Americans were to face an uphill battle for many years to come. Who would face that battle? To say the fight for black civil rights "was a grassroots movement of ordinary people who accomplished extraordinary things" would be an understatement. Countless people made it their life's work to see the progression of civil rights in America. People like W.E.B. DuBois, Marcus Garvey, A Phillip Randolph, Eleanor Roosevelt, and many others contributed to the fight although it would take ordinary people as well to lead the way in the fight for civil rights. This paper will focus on two people whose intelligence and bravery influenced future generations of civil rights organizers and crusaders. Ida B.Wells and Mary Mcleod Bethune were two African American women whose tenacity and influence would define the term "ordinary to extraordinary".
In Southern Horrors and Other Writings three pamphlets written by Ida B. Wells are highlighted. These pamphlets showed that Wells used muckraking/ investigative reporting to describe what was going on in the south. Wells saw the corruption that was occurring in the South, and wanted to make it known to the public. Wells also uses persuasive writing to get the support of the African American community and she had hoped to create change. Wells’ writings are finally a historically effective text, not just because they are primary source documents, but because she served as a voice to the African American people.
... would recommend it to others because it is a good lesson filled with a lot of comic relief.
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