Someone who uses a patent against a piece of software will usually be a competitor and won't care about the right to distribute that particular program himself.

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In open-source software (OSS), Europe is at the forefront.

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Given the size of the Linux code, it?s almost certain that it will violate a number of patents, and some of them, such as the ones on the FAT file system, may indeed be held by Microsoft.

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I can't imagine they really want to ostracize companies that use DRM. There are highly legitimate interests of copyright holders involved.

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Also, there are economic studies which show that Europe has a trade deficit in software versus the U.S. in the tens of billions of dollars per year, so there is obviously some hope over here to become a little more independent from a few large and mostly American vendors.

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