Talking Software Patents with a Politician?

agent dero asks: "I'm currently trying to land an hour or two of my local representative to the House of Representatives so I can talk about software patents, amongst other things. I'm looking for the best way to describe the pitfalls of Software Patents to somebody who hasn't the slightest clue what Open Source is, let alone how software patents will hurt it. How can a computer geek relate the evil in patenting algorithms to a non-computer geek to where it will have an effective impact?"

Re:Money

[Tonnerre]

Actually, the wallets are on your side. The majority of small and medium-sized enterprises is against software patents, and even the few that subscribed to the http://www.ffii.org/ [ffii.org] campaign already have more annual turnover than Microsoft, who is very vocal about software patents.
Also, the big companies are arguing mainly that the small ones want software patents (which the small ones deny, of course).
So it's also about saving a large part of the european economy.

Tonnerre