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Organisations For the last few years the European Patent Office has, contrary to the letter and spirit of the existing law, granted about 30000 patents on computer-implementable rules of organisation and calculation (programs for computers). Now the European patent movement wants to change the law so as to legalise this practise and remove all barriers to patentability. Programmers are to lose their freedom of expression and the control over their copyrighted work. Citizens are to be barred from independently developping their preferred forms of communication. As a compensation for this "intellectual expropriation" we are offered ... less innovation, less competition, less good software.

UNPO UNDP, United Nations Development Program, «Human Development Report» 1999, Oxford University Press, 1999. (http://www.undp.org/hdro/index2.html): "The relentless march of intellectual property rights must be stopped and questioned" IBM Patent Server (http://www.patents.ibm.com/ibm.html): Hier sind alle US-Patente der letzten >20 Jahre zu finden. Ein nützlicher Dienst, der nebenbei IBM immer mit Informationen darüber versorgt, wer derzeit was sucht. The Software Patent Institute (http://www.spi.org): Umfassende Datenbank, gefördert von IBM, MS u.a., gemeinnützig, intended to solve the problems of priority research. As the years pass by, such a solution seems more distant than ever. University of Michigan Media Union Library: Software Patents (http://www.ummu.umich.edu/library/PTO/Software.html): Überblick über diverse Ressourcen zum Für und Wider von Softwarepatenten Weltorganisation für das Geistige Eigentum (http://www.wipo.org): drängt auf weltweit einheitliche Durchsetzung von Verwertungsvorrechten.