Okej i korta drag går det ut på att EU vill införa liknande patent regler som USA. Vilket kommer leda till att mjukvara kommer bli patenterbart. Detta kommer bara gynna storföretagen som har råd att ta patent samt att se till så ingen annan bryter mot dem (hörde jag någon skrika Monopol?).
Som ett exempel kan sägas. Om ett företag har patent på ett vist mjukvarukoncept betyder det att ett annant företag inte får skriva ett program som bygger på samma koncept för att konurera. Problemet med mjukvarupatent är att de blir för generella. Tänk att Bianci tar patent på konceptet cykel, då skulle ingen annan få tilverka cyklar. I USA har tex microsoft lyckats patentera "dubbel klick med musen" så i praktiken måste man fråga m$ om lov innan man använder samma mekanism i sitt program.
Citat från www.ffii.org (Bra informations källa)
"If Haydn had patented "a symphony, characterised by that sound is produced [ in extended sonata form ]", Mozart would have been in trouble.
Unlike copyright, patents can block independent creations. Software patents can render software copyright useless. One copyrighted work can be covered by hundreds of patents of which the author doesn't even know but for whose infringement he and his users can be sued. Some of these patents may be impossible to work around, because they are broad or because they are part of communication standards.
Evidence from economic studies shows that software patents have lead to a decrease in R&D spending.
Advances in software are advances in abstraction. While traditional patents were for concrete and physical inventions, software patents cover ideas. Instead of patenting a specific mousetrap, you patent any "means of trapping mammals" or "means of trapping data in an emulated environment". The fact that the universal logic device called "computer" is used for this does not constitute a limitation. When software is patentable, anything is patentable.
In most countries, software has, like mathematics and other abstract subject matter, been explicitely considered to be outside the scope of patentable inventions. However these rules were broken one or another way. The patent system has gone out of control. A closed community of patent lawyers is creating, breaking and rewriting its own rules without much supervision from the outside."