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Videotron in Montreal used to have this (1990) for hockey games with Videoway.

It's reserved for the current EU-funded R&D programme, Framework Programme 6.

No, the population has increased. The population of the United States has doubled in 50 years, and trebled in 70.

The correct statement would be, "Patents should be extended as deemed necessary and beneficial for promoting invention."

But you can't sue anybody for liability over a work that's in the public domain.

You have no rights whatsoever to any works you didn't write yourself.

"Open source" is about granting a license to make certain uses, but attaching to that license a maliciously insidious clause that governs not only what somebody does with your software, but what somebody does with their own software that merely uses your software.

That's nightmarish compared with standard commercial software licenses for libraries. It's insane.

Your link is just about as shady as it gets. Look, it doesn't matter what patents IBM files.

It does matter that IBM is actively trying to expand the borders of patentable subject matter, and actively lobbying (both at patent offices and with politicians) to get the broken US system introduced in Europe.

Has IBM (in recent times) used it's patent portfolio to squash competition or to do generally evil things? No.

How many small European software companies do you think can play the patent game? Do you think IBM does not know this? IBM knows that no-one else can compete with them in the patent race, and even if someone else has a patent, they can get access to a cheap/free license because of the tons of patents they have.

See the remark at the top of page 4 of this testimony to the European Commission. That reference dates back to 1990, but there is no reason to assume that they stopped leveraging this competitive advantage while at the same time obtaining more and more patents, and starting to enforce their patents more actively from 1993 onwards (see slide 13, the curve does not flatten because R&D spending declines, but because patent license income goes up).

IBM has invented a good chunk of the technology out there today. The article mentions pursuing patent claims against Oracle, well, IBM invented the relational database!

Yes, and IBM tried to claim it invented case conversion using a lookup table (click on the patent number to get the pdf). Fortunately, there was prior art.

You also seem to assume that because someone did something first, they have a natural right to a monopoly on doing that. They don't. Patent law is a purely economical law which introduces artificial monopolies in the market. You only do that if you find out the market is running completely haywire due to the absence of such monopolies. IBM's early software work was not patented either, simply because there were no software patents. Did IBM suffer because of that? Of course not, they benefited a lot from he fact that the creators of VisiCalc hadn't patented "the database", even though they "invented" it.

Software patents are not necessary to keep the software market at large innovating or functioning correctly. Even enquiries by pro-swpat institutes like Max Planck and Fraunhofer show that competition is the main driving force to keep innovating. If you don't innovate, your competitor will and you lose.

Time to market and copyright give you a small lead time advantage, and the fact that the resulting monopolies are either fairly narrow but long (copyright) or broad but short (trade secret) means that the industry can keep moving at a high pace and does not require the high transaction costs associated with patents (and without requiring huge cross licensing deals between large companies).

A lot of companies exist and make lots of money based on technologies that IBM invented but did not pursue.

And IBM makes a lot of money on innovations from other people. Additionally, you don't hear about the individual cases where companies like IBM press other companies into paying for licenses, unless they go to court (which is only a very small fraction, who can fight IBM in court?). Companies also do not publicise that kind of things, since the fact that they have to pay 1% to 5% of their revenue on a product to IBM (or anyone else) is not good publicity.

Exactly because such cases are not publicised by anyone, there are

Still, it is a bit of a stretch to think that we invaded Iraq to fend off the Euro. I'd like to see some hard evidence before spending more time entertaining the thought.

Oh, and one thing we both forgot to mention is the state of the European Union's economy. According to this article, it's been growing much slower that the US's -- and that in 2003, the US GDP per capita was 55 per cent higher than the EU's.

Tell me, which is more an incentive to innovate (to the innovator):

A) You come up with an idea and we'll let you fight it out in the marketplace with four other companies OR

B) You come up with an idea and everyone in the U.S. will have to come to you for the solution. And it will be you and only you for the next 20 years.

well? OK.

You are missing several things of the big picture:

• Once someone has a monopoly on something, he will be much less inclined to keep on innovating, since the competition is very much restricted in improving what he did. Therefore, this monopoly is only justifiable if without the outlook to this monopoly, the innovation would never have happened. At least in the software world, this is highly unlikely, since competition is the main drive there to innovate (if you don't innovate, you can as well close up shop). That's confirmed by, among others, this study (presentation slides, see especially slides 15-16) by the Fraunhofer and Max Planck institutes and the FTC report on the effects of patents on innovation.
• An innovator does not live alone in the world. Once he gets a monopoly, he will without a doubt hinder other innovators with this patent. If generally this hindering effect causes more innovation not to happen than the amount of innovation that happens thanks to the fact that patent protection is available, it's also better that you have no patents. Again, the FTC report notes that this is the case in the software field. The main reason is that innovation in the software field is mainly incremental (improving things that other people have done before) instead of revolutionary (doing completely new things).

Patents increase innovation by forcing you to tell the world about your invention. Once the patent is up, ANYONE can take you patent and solve the problem you solved.

That's the theory. In practice, programmers can barely understand the legalese of software patents. And since software patents do not even include source code, it's even arguable whether they really contain a usable solution in many cases. Finally, (and this goes for all patents) companies are actively discouraged to go looking in patent databases looking for solutions. The reason is that, even if they did not find a solution and came up with something themselves, if they are sued afterwards, they can be ordered to pay tripple damages, because in that case it's considered "willful infringement".

The quid pro quo though is that in exchange for the disclosure, as a "thank you" for innovating and telling the world, you get the right to prevent others from implementing your solution. Which is a bigger thank you? that you get to fight it out in the marketplace, or that you and you alone can practice the invention?

It has nothing to do with "thank you", but everything with "if we didn't give you this monopoly, we would be even worse off, because we wouldn't know how to solve that particular problem". This monopoly can thus only be justified if there is a very low chance of independent rediscovery by other people and if the original innovator would very likely not have done the innovation himself without the incentive of getting a 20 year monopoly.

Please explain to me how the patent system benefits society as a whole, as you've asserted, other than the quid pro quo I stated above i.e., the patent tells anyone how to solve a given problem, in exchange for which, you get the limited monopoly.

The theory is that the disclosure of the innovation benefits society more than that the 20-year monopoly hampers it. This theory may have held back in the 15th century, when you usually had "on

But I think the software patent issue is more complicated than you think.

The software patent issue is more complicated than you think, too.

Laws should be designed to solve actual problems, not to promote some ideology or to force consistency upon things that might be different. Since our world is complex, law might not be perfect; trade-offs are to be made. Policy is about making such trade-offs, and about finding a good balance between contradicting needs.

What does this imply for patents? First of all, the fact that inventions in the traditional sense are patentable alone is a weak justification for software patents. Secondly, we need to understand the specific problems of software development, and how they relate to patents.

One issue is software development is re-use of both specific implementations -- which are protected by copyright -- and concepts. I'm doing software development in a research context (i.e. demonstrators and prototypes, rarely products). One problem I encounter again and again is the urge of many software developers to re-invent wheels. Usually this involves re-making all mistakes that have been made before. Implications are waste of time, money and humans; poor quality; and security issues.

For systems connected to or built upon a worldwide infrastructure like the Internet, there are usually few right ways to solve certain problems, and many wrong ways. What we need today more than ever is an environment -- technical, cultural, and legal -- that encourages doing things the right way, and discourages poor quality and insecurity. What patents do encourage, however, is re-invention, and avoidance of approved solutions that are or might be patented.

The other issue is cooperation. While open source software development is kind of the ultimate form of it, cooperative development also becomes increasingly important in the realm of proprietary products. Which, by the way, is strongly encouraged by the European Union: all EU-supported research involves cooperation of multiple organizations from different countries.

Not only patents but the entire concept of intellectual property needs to be reconsidered for such cooperations between multiple organizations. Sure, there are contracts. But there is also an issue contracts cannot really solve: if cooperation is close -- think extreme programming -- it might become impossible to assign ownership of a piece of work to entities in an non-arbitrary way. What you end up with generally is a mess. Patents don't solve that problem either, but might make it worse.

It does not even take cooperation to create an intellectual property mess. I'm grateful to SCO for demonstrating this is in a pretty convincing manner. Sell your "intellectual property" a couple of times, and no one will understand any more who formally "owns" what.

These are problems that do exist today. Policymakers should address them, rather than worsening them for the sake of intellectual property and patent ideology.

Besides, what kind of dorky attitude is it that nobody should be allowed to build on an idea for twenty years?!? Imagine that somebody has had a trivial idea and you get the same idea from elsewhere, and build something much larger on it. Well, you cannot use your ideas for the next twenty years if the first person has patented it.

This concept can be held to any kind of patent. From engines to circuit boards to anything.

• Circuit boards aren't generally patentable either in Europe (we have a sui generic right for chip design protection)
• A normal patent is on an invention, not on an idea like with most software patents. Patents were never designed to protect ideas.

So, your saying there should be no patents. No IP protections.

NTT were a major driving force behind WCDMA technology. Saying that Japan is following Europe in WCDMA technology is vastly underestimating the input of Japanese companies and the Japanese subsideries of European and US companies in development of the technology. Like other large telecoms companies like AT&T (used to), NTT invests a huge amount into research. They may not produce the products, but they were heavily involved in the design initial stages.

I hate to tell you that this is not really a substantive limitation. Even if software can't be patented per se, it can still be patented by referring to the computer and software together, and including a technical effect of the invention. Either way, software is going to be patented.

Read for yourself, especially articles 2 and 3.

Actually, they do. That wealthy society exists because of the laws that protect all types of property. Think about how much wealth you could create without the law, then tell me who's creating the wealth. Law and lawyers create the system that supports the very possibility of a capitalist society.

Just look at e.g. this study carried out by the Fraunhofer Institute for Intellectual Property no less. Look at the graphs, e.g. page 15. Companies use other things to protect software creations and to gain competitive advantages. Patents mainly introduce extra costs, strategic patenting and legal insecurity (because you never know whether you will be able to sell the product you are currently developing).

What they have in common, if you'll think about it for a moment, is that the author in one instance, and the engineer in the other, both have to work around previously existing works that are protected.

You still have to try the exercise of imagining the value of software innovation would be without patents.

You don't need to do exercises for that. You just have to look at existing studies on the motivations of software companies to innovate, for example this presentation of a study performed by the Fraunhofer Institute (owners of the MP3 patents) and the Max Planck Institute. Have a look at slide 15. Patents are the least used way to protect software development, especially in the "primary sector" (= software development sector in their study, the secondary sector was for them companies whose primary purpose is not to develop software, but who also do it to e.g. steer their washing machines etc.)

You don't need software patents to protect investments in software development and RD, and at the same time software patents held by others can completely undermine any investments you made.

I don't say the patent system is perfect. I just say it is the best we have.

No, it is not, especially not as far as software innovation is concerned.

Do you honestly think the big guys are really interested in a few tens (hundreds) thousands lines of code or a bunch of engineers? No, they are after their innovative ideas, i.e. their patents. No patent, no cash.

It's true that big companies try to amass as many patents as possible, but that has nothing to do with wanting to get access to innovative ideas they wouldn't come up with themselves. It's called strategic patenting, for both offensive (keep others out of the market) and defensive (make sure others can't keep you out of the market) purposes.

If there weren't any patents, smaller companies would be picked based on their ability to turn great ideas into great products, instead of based on their ability to turn basic ideas into broad patents.

Having a few big companies fighting each other over patents is actually not that bad. The little guy will have some bargaining power by threatening to sell his patent to some other company.

And what if the little guy isn't interested in acquiring patents for EUR 40,000 a piece, but simply wants to develop great software? And what's so great about companies spending millions on litigation instead of on R&D?

Having big companies interested in funding research department is not that a bad idea either. Where else do you expect innovation to come from?

Spending much on patents is completely different from innovating a lot. Have a look at e.g. this study (ppt slides) which shows that it's not the innovators that get most patents. Also look at this arcticle by the senior VP of IBM, where he bluntly states that

It would be naive for any company (or for that matter, any country) to assume that amassing patents for patents' sake is a meaningful measure of success. Invention only matters when it positively transforms an institution, a business, a society or our lives. Rather than numbers, it's the application of invention--coupled with deep insight, experience and even intuition--that results in genuine innovation.

You don't need patents to encourage insightful applications, experience and intuition. If anything, they hamper that. Companies will not stop pouring money into software research and innovation if they can't get patents for that. After all, they already did that before they could get them, and they also have to continue doing that to remain competitive. If they stop innovating, they will fall behind in the race for the customer.

Note that I'm not claiming that the most innovative company always has the highest market share, there are obviously other fac

Actually, there is no need to convince your MP using the open source argument, SMEs and independent software developers generally have difficulties on dealing with patents.

Normally they have not patent department, no money to split off from development effort to inance the process of getting patents, and no left to finance patent trials.


The Summary from a study says:

- Broader patentability of software seems not desirable:
- the lower level of protection is no locational disadvantage
- companies oppose US model
- international, strategic use of patents obvious, but concentrated on relatively few large companies.

BTW:
UK Gov't Considers Expanding Open Source Use
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/10/12/0 23221 3&tid=

It's especially of relevance because the EU has agreed that they must especially foster the SMEs.

They are about 99.8% of a companies in Europa and provide two thirds of all employment!

As you can read on the link above, the EU started the 6th Framework Programme which includes 2,100 million for SME participation

Tell your MP how contraticory this is!

I think clearly there is some serious thinking going on in Government circles about Open Source and technology projects. Has anybody looked at the EU guidelines? They've even set up a special body to promote open and interoperable stuff across the EU... More stuff

It is interesting to see where we are in say after 10 more years.

You are assuming here that the webmaster is reasonable, and reacts to user's complaints. However, more often than not, this is unfortunately not the case: For example, this site has had a Javascript cover page barring access to anyone who has not a 800*600 screen (or not screen at all, for that matter...). And it has been like this for over a year, and despite repeated complaints. Ironically enough, once you have passed this obnoxious doorman (by going directly to http://www.cordis.lu/en/), you get to a nice site which is quite accessible, and which even has alt tags on their images.

Unfortunately, such cases are not isolated. Often, polite complaints about such issues are often met with silence, or with ramblings about how 99.99% of the population use Internet Explorer anyways, or with idle promises to do better (but even after a year, no action). In fact, in the vast majority of cases, mailing the webmaster didn't bring any betterment of the site. I know even a case of a non-profit who had contracted out the design of their website to a "professional" web design firm. The site came back full of alt-less images and obnoxious javascript. After the non-profit corrected those issues, the web design firm attempted to pressure them to revert back to the original (i.e. inaccessible) web design.

Maybe you are a good webmaster who reacts on user feedback, but unfortunately most don't :-(

For all you now, Robert Gumson probably did try to work this out amicably before going to court, but got the "use Internet Explorer, like everybody else" spiel rather than an improvement of the site.

You are assuming here that the webmaster is reasonable, and reacts to user's complaints. However, more often than not, this is unfortunately not the case: For example, this site has had a Javascript cover page barring access to anyone who has not a 800*600 screen (or not screen at all, for that matter...). And it has been like this for over a year, and despite repeated complaints. Ironically enough, once you have passed this obnoxious doorman (by going directly to http://www.cordis.lu/en/), you get to a nice site which is quite accessible, and which even has alt tags on their images.

Unfortunately, such cases are not isolated. Often, polite complaints about such issues are often met with silence, or with ramblings about how 99.99% of the population use Internet Explorer anyways, or with idle promises to do better (but even after a year, no action). In fact, in the vast majority of cases, mailing the webmaster didn't bring any betterment of the site. I know even a case of a non-profit who had contracted out the design of their website to a "professional" web design firm. The site came back full of alt-less images and obnoxious javascript. After the non-profit corrected those issues, the web design firm attempted to pressure them to revert back to the original (i.e. inaccessible) web design.

Maybe you are a good webmaster who reacts on user feedback, but unfortunately most don't :-(

For all you now, Robert Gumson probably did try to work this out amicably before going to court, but got the "use Internet Explorer, like everybody else" spiel rather than an improvement of the site.

For those interested in present and future EU funding in this area the following link is very informative: Free / open source software actions in European programmes.

One thing that I don't dislike in the European Union is the sense that they seem to have regarding information technology. It seems like they are making decisions which really could benefit the European Union and not a single company. This shows for example through the IST (information society technologies programme coordinated by EU).

This gives you a glimpse to some open source based / utilizing projects they are supporting:
51 records found.

I don't know if opensource is the magic for getting EU money, but atleast it does not seem like it closes your opportunities. Just as it should be. But atleast it should be easier to get rational decisions in here than in US, in which I assume the elections are more strictly based on how much marketing support the candidate gets from selected corporations :))

One thing that I don't dislike in the European Union is the sense that they seem to have regarding information technology. It seems like they are making decisions which really could benefit the European Union and not a single company. This shows for example through the IST (information society technologies programme coordinated by EU).

This gives you a glimpse to some open source based / utilizing projects they are supporting:
51 records found.

I don't know if opensource is the magic for getting EU money, but atleast it does not seem like it closes your opportunities. Just as it should be. But atleast it should be easier to get rational decisions in here than in US, in which I assume the elections are more strictly based on how much marketing support the candidate gets from selected corporations :))

http://www.cordis.lu/telematics/tap_transport/rese arch/projects/cromatica.html

Their other projects are also interesting as well

http://www.cordis.lu/telematics/tap_transport/rese arch/projects/cromatica.html

Their other projects are also interesting as well

SME: small and medium-sized enterprises; technology-oriented companies with fewer than 250 employees

What's wrong with <a href="help.html" target="newframe"> ? As you see, having linked pages appear in a new window is perfectly doable in plain HTML. And if you really want to be fancy, just put the damn javascript link into a document.write clause, and a plain HTML link between <NOSCRIPT> tags. Javascript's language designers have supplied great backwards compatibility tools, but unfortunately nowadays the <NOSCRIPT> tags are hardly ever used for that puropose. Instead boorish web designers use them for such intelligent messages as "You're a moron for not using javascript, and a cheap bastard for having a screen with a resolution below 1600x1200"...

p.s. a picture of Miss Flannery for you, Shoe.

the EU wants to go "free/open" and this is a great excuse for a public flogging to justify it

Let me remind you that the EU Council of Ministers has recently approved a Copyright Directive that is at least as evil as the DMCA, and that it is very close to approving software patents.

On the other hand, it's true that the EU will be subsidizing free software projects. So I suppose there are contradictory signals. But certainly there hasn't been any high-level decision that Free Software is the way to go.

AFAIK, even in Lotus Notes itself Javascript is optional (it is more useful for filling out Lotus documents over the Web, but less for static contents). And actually most of the hyperlinks on notes.net are ok, except the download links. Which proves that it's somehow possible to have plain hyperlinks, even in Domino.

Btw, Lotus is not the only site to gratuitously require javascript. There is also http://www.polytechniciens.com/, who for some reason thought it was smart to wrap all their contents of their main page into document.write() statements. Oddly enough, the page still can be viewed (without the Javascript) at http://www.polytechniciens.com/index.html.

And most boorish of all http://www.cordis.lu who just do it with a <NOSCRIPT> tag. This is a government sponsored site, which normally should know better than to wilfully restrict people's access in such a way. Blind people browsing with lynx and a braille line are effectively shut out of the site. While the government spends millions to retrofit their physical buildings with ramps to present easy access for the disabled, cordis's id10t webmaster thinks he's so leet shutting them out in this want-on manner...

This nanotech is a step in the right direction, for as far as I know circuts cannot be made any smaller than this (due to quantum uncertanty).

Actually this is a very good point, and one that could tie in nicely with another emerging technology, quantum processors.

Just grabbing the nearest link, you can read a fairly detailed exploration of the idea of quantum computers here. (With another bit of reading here)

Wouldn't it be interesting to consider pursuing the idea of quantum-level circuits, with perhaps some form of quantum circuit-control that takes full advantage of the nature of quantum matter?
I can imagine that the computing industry already has such vast momentum in terms of making things smaller and faster that the barrier of quantum mechanics will be one that is eventually broken, or at least bent to the will of computer manufacturers.

When that happens, we might see single-processor lateral processing as well as fully integrated quantum circuitry with near-instantaneous feedback (or even instantaneous, if quantum entanglement can be leveraged?).

Very interesting, and exciting stuff :)

B.