Looks like something similar to the gif patent shit is going on with many patents in europe, hard to sort through all the mumbo jumbo though to figure out what's really going on.
http://perso.wanadoo.fr/pierre.g/xnview/enhome.html
In case that page gets changed or removed (it's supposed to be a 10 day protest, ending yesterday)
http://allspark.net/cypherswipe/software-protest.html

It's actually 'just' an adoption of what (as far as I know) has been the case in the USA for some time already: the most trivial things in software being patented. The GIF disaster isn't such a good example, because that was actually about a compression technique and thus at least somewhat justifyable (?). Think along the lines of Amazon's one-click patent, someone's patent on scrollbars and all of these silly things.

*Shrug* I couldn't tell what it was all about. That page and all the sites it linked to spent all their time ranting about the problem, and no time stating what the problem actually was. (Not a very good way to run a protest.)

Edited by Cypherswipe at 21:32 on April, 16th 2004

Well, the linked pages basically do say it all. Check out this one, it sums up the whole problem perfectly.

I checked one of the linked pages, and it was the site I had in mind when I was talking about them ranting about the problem without really saying what the problem was.

So what don't you understand then? It's pretty clear to me...

As far as I know, the problem is that many standard procedures (i.e. simple things that are necessary for programming and software) are protected by patents. In my opinion they are too general to patent them. I mean, no one can (hopefully) get a patent on "walking out of a door", right?

Are you sure? A patent on the human genes has already been granted, I'm just waiting for the bill of the license fees. So why not patent breathing as well?