Real innovation should be rewarded, not things like “Oh, I’ve decided to patent emoticons”. Even though everyone else has been using them in one form or another since the late 1970’s on Usenet and BBSes !!![/quote:296d7ea17f]
Oh, puuuleeeaze – not these and Amazon’s One-Click again! We software professionals have ourselves, collectively and unambiguously, put our hand up to acknowledge many times over in many forums that there are such things as bad patents (be it software or others – it may strike you that software is but one technical discipline amongst very many others :wink: ). Just not many of them in Europe at all (and I mean not many – a few hundreds at the very most).
But the EPC (and the respective national patent laws of member states) is well-equipped to deal with these – witness, no European equivalents to the US ’emoticons’ or ‘one-click’ patents, is there? :roll: