O Público: Manuel Castells says "Patenting software equals destroying software"

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10 March 2005 -- Manuel Castells uses the recent decision of the Council of Ministers of the EU over software patents to exemplify the resistance of a European culture which doesn't favour innovation.

Translation of selecteds quotes

• Q: Is your criticism about the "Lisbon Agenda" brakes a criticism on the [Member] States? A: It's a criticism on the States and a self-criticism on the strategy designers. Concretely, software is the language of the information age. If it doesn't work, nothing else does, because

  it is the heart of the technological system. Today March, the Council of Ministers can be approving the possibility to patent software, even though the European Parliament has opposed it twice. Patenting software equals destroying software. The vast majority of created software in the workd is best done by people no one pays, which places their work on-line, making its source code available for others to access and maybe improve it. All this will stop happening if someone patents it.

In: http://jornal.publico.pt/noticias.asp?id=10501&sid=1129

Castells' Background

Manuel Castells, one of the key architects of the Lisbon Agenda/Strategy, was a sociology professor in University of California Berkeley and now works at the Universitat de Barcelona. His areas of competence are sociology and the economics of information technology. "The Rise of the Network Society", first volume included in "The Information Age: Economy, Society,and Culture" (Blackwell), made him famous all over the world, as it was referenced many times by books concerning the sociology of the Internet Age. See http://sociology.berkeley.edu/faculty/castells/