Microsoft: Bullying Europeans Again

Bill Gates got a meeting with the Prime Minister of Denmark, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, and told him that if Denmark doesn't help force through the software patents nonsense that the democratically elected European Parliament has rejected time and time again,
he'll put 800 Danish IT developers out of work. This, of course, is the same way that the Irish presidency got so enthusiastic about implementing the same stupid, broken system in Europe as they have in the US (Microsoft have put a lot of money into Ireland, and it would be a shame if it went to a more 'flexible' country).

Other companies that have tried this bullying/blackmail technique are Siemens, Nokia, Philips, Ericsson and Alcatel. At least they're European companies, but shame on them all. Software patents - sorry, computer-implemented invention patents - are the bottom feeders of modern technology in the US, with some companies existing purely to make things miserable and costly for small and medium sized business by waving patents and threats of litigation over their heads. The US Patent Office has a quota system in place with their clerks, so they have to get through as many as possible without looking into the claimed invention in depth, so you get ridiculous patents like Microsoft's double-click covering patent, Amazon's one-click-purchase patent (because nobody had rushed the idea of storing a credit card number in a database through a patent application before), and the huge spat between Adobe and Macromedia regarding tabbed dialogue boxes (which has been part of various GUIs for... years). Kodak pulled a fast one over on Sun Microsystems for its Java virtual machine, despite Kodak not coming up with the idea but buying a patent from someone else.

Grrr! It's all utter arse.