Software patents favor litigation in detriment of innovation, defeating their legitimate purpose. They force software producers to spend on bureaucracy and lawsuits what would otherwise be spent on Research and Development. They (software patents) compromise the ability of European individuals and small companies to compete with big corporations which thus obtain a means to exert unfair control over the market.

Should be 'favour'. As we're European, we should follow the British -- not the American -- English. :)

In my opinion the text must be more focused – and a little bit more straight "we don't beg - we are justified".
Additionally the text must dock and hide behind principles which are strong enough not to be attacked by the other party.

only an idea / draft variation: e.g.

Software patents miss their legitimate purpose.
They favor litigation in detriment of innovation, defeating their democratic justification.
They force software producers to spend on bureaucracy and lawsuits what would otherwise be spent on Research and Development.
They compromise the ability of European individuals and small companies to compete with big corporations which thus obtain a means to exert unfair control over the market.
The only purpose of regulation has always been to support balance of powers and the democratic constitution and not monopolistic tendencies.
Overregulation does not help the market.
Less is more – Stop software patents.

[I also have the BadHeader error which prevents me from voting.]

The current text expresses my opinion nearly perfectly.

My suggestsions:

substitute /They (software patents)/software patents/

substitute /thus obtain a means to exert unfair control over the market./thus obtain an unfair advantage in the market/

Patenting software stops progress as a lot of time is also spent trying to circumvent patents. It is opposed to open knowledge and bad for all innovation. There is sufficient protection either under the GPL or the Creative Commons licence (http://www.creativecommons.org). Patenting processes also stops the generation of natural communities of common interest.

(I would like to rate some of these but there is an error on the website at the moment:

NameError at /

global name 'BadHeaderError' is not defined

Request Method: POST
Request URL: http://stopsoftwarepatents.eu/
Exception Type: NameError
Exception Value:

global name 'BadHeaderError' is not defined

Exception Location: /home/pet/draft/app02/views.py in pet, line 41
Python Executable: /usr/bin/python
Python Version: 2.5.2
Python Path: ['/home/pet/', '/home/pet/draft', '/usr/lib/python2.5', '/usr/lib/python2.5/plat-linux2', '/usr/lib/python2.5/lib-tk', '/usr/lib/python2.5/lib-dynload', '/usr/local/lib/python2.5/site-packages', '/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages', '/usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/PIL', '/var/lib/python-support/python2.5']
Server time: Wed, 24 Sep 2008 11:59:17 +0200

etc)