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However he, TFA writer Martin Goetz, argues software should be patentable.

He does indeed. The author I was referring to was PoIR in his post on Groklaw.

So does Martin Goetz though. For instance he argues about hardware implementations versus software implementations. Implemented in hardware something would be patentable so if instead it's implemented in software it should also be patentable.

Of course my own bias affects how I see it. Personally I oppose patents just as many economists who've studied the economic effects of patents have concluded.

Falcon

If the govt were to remove patent protection, the inventors would go back to trade secrets. And if that won't work, they probably won't release any products using that invention -- they don't want to do free R&D for some big company.

If they don't release their invention they don't get paid either. They will get paid though if said corporation pays them to invent something. If after the employee invents something but the corporation does not pay then there's such a thing called a court where the worker can sue. Said worker can also say to another company "if you give me a million dollars I will show you how to make X."

If the govt were to remove patent protection, the inventors would go back to trade secrets. And if that won't work, they probably won't release any products using that invention -- they don't want to do free R&D for some big company.

Ah, so you're more qualified than the economists who studied patents and concluded they have a negative impact on the economy? So what are your qualifications are and what peer reviewed studies have you done?

they don't want to do free R&D for some big company.

Open source programmers do it all the tyme.

Falcon

The hammer/executable is neither patented nor copyrighted. But making a copy of the hammer/executable would be patent infringement. So the effect would be the same (you can't copy this unless I say so) except the duration of protection would be about 20 years instead of 70+ years.

That is not reasonable. Patents have a negative impact on economics.

Falcon

our whole patent system in the U.S. should be completely dismantled.

Many economists and I agree. Patents have a negative impact on the economy.

Falcon

A lot of things will seem obvious once I do all the engineering and testing and release the product, so why should I do that if my only guarantee is that you will follow my blueprint and profit off my work - not in addition to, but instead of, me?

Why should I spend my tyme and money to invent something when someone else can beat me to patenting it? After I spent all that tyme and effort someone else can block my use of my own hard work. However without patents I have an incentive to make my item better or cheaper. And if someone else can also make it then that only encourages me to do better and faster so I can have First mover advantage.

Patents are the problem.

Falcon

I think that copyrights should still be used to protect a particular implementation of any algorithm in code. Not one or the other, black and white,

Except only specific implementations are supposed be patented. That is why reverse engineering is legal.

The big problem is that the USPTO can't seem to recognize when the situation does not call for a patent.

It's not just the patent office that don't know that patents are bad. But there has been a number of studies on the economic effects of patents, many of which find strong indications for patents having a negative impact.

Falcon

The choice of implementation for computer functions is a pure economic choice which mainly has to do with cost, speed, and flexibility.

That's absolutely correct. And the reason that people choose software when they can get away with it, is because it generally much cheaper, faster to implement and more flexible. Which in turn results in completely economic effects of patent claims that include software implementations compared to claims that only cover hardware implementations.

The whole argument about software companies also performing state-of-the-art R&D should be irrelevant from a patents-point-of-view. Patents are not a natural right (they're not awarded because someone deserves them for whatever reason), but they are purely economic tools. And blunt and wide-reaching ones at that. Applying blunt and wide-reaching tools without discrimination just because some things are alike in terms of intellectual achievement does not necessarily have the same economic effects. Again: patents are not rewards, they're tools, to be applied with care where it makes macro-economic sense, not to protect certain business models at the cost of a huge overhead for an entire sector of industry.

And according to various economic studies (also includes citations from some political documents, feel free to ignore those), patents indeed don't have overall positive effects on in the software field. In fact, the 2003 report on innovation from the FTC came to the conclusion that patents are not very important to innovation in the semiconductor industry either (although slightly more so than in case of software, and their downsides are slightly less detrimental in that case). So the whole comparison with hardware and software does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that the author of the article envisions...

Naaaa.. who really reads patents to work around them? Take what is known as the core mp3-patent, http://eupat.ffii.org/pikta/mupli/ep287578/index.en.html for instance. (its not valid anymore now)... Ogg infringed this. But most folks just assumes its clear by not looking at patents or not claiming them in open standards. The patents are still there like land mines scaring people off from publishing source or selling software. Thats a very powerful barrier against innovation. These patents survive because they are too darn invisible, if they would be more transparent we would have removed them from the software market a log time ago. Instead they create uncertainty and risks that make us invent less and stay friends with the giants that protect us.

Here's a link to a post with some quotes from that paper.

And here's my own collection of summaries a bunch of economic studies on the effects of and importance of software patents (it also includes some opinions of political committees, but those are clearly marked).

Which is why Microsoft, with its thousands of patents, so easily struck down Google when all it had was a couple of patents on search technology, effectively cutting Google off at the knees and leaving Microsoft free to dominate the search engine market.

I think the main reason that Microsoft didn't do that, is because Microsoft completely missed the initial boat as far as the Internet is concerned.

The fact that large companies regularly go rent seeking with small companies is fairly well documented, even though most companies don't advertise this fact (which company would want to publicise that they're at the mercy of a patent owner?). Unless a case goes to court, you're unlikely to ever read anything in the press about it. Nevertheless, e.g. IBM's rent seeking tactics have been documented fairly well.

Not exactly the most IP-compliant country in the world, and pretty much has the USA over a barrel economically right now from the look of things.

It's actually worse than that. The whole "the Chinese are stealing all of our patents" mantra turned out to be largely BS. It were US companies that started by convincing the Chinese to license all sorts of worthless patents. And, oh surprise, when the Chinese companies later on figured out they had been duped in paying tons of money for worthless rights, the next time they said GFY.

We don't have software patents in europe currently, and are doing perfectly fine anyway, thank you very much.

You're both right and wrong ... and I'm guessing you won't like the conclusion.

The wrong bit: "we don't have software patents in Europe currently" ... Even ffii.org (hardly a champion of the European Patent system) says that the EPO has granted over 30,000 software patents. FFII faq about software patents

The right bit: "and are doing perfectly fine anyway, thank you very much." You said it, not me.

The difference is that the EPO only grants patents for software that includes a technical advance. No business methods.

I think we can indeed agree that software patents have not killed the software industry. That's however not a very strong argument if you claim that software patents are necessary or even helpful.

Yes, but it refutes GP's argument that software patents are bad per se.

No, it only proves that they (or at least the way they are used by the majority of patent holders at this time) are not bad enough to kill off the industry. It does not in any way refute the argument that they are bad.

It's equivalent to an assertion that if we didn't have the death penalty, there would be a thousand-fold increase in the murder rate. Sure, that's an interesting thought, but there's no evidence whatsoever, so on its own, it doesn't really mean much.

There are many countries without a death penalty and with lower murder rates, which is an indication that this would be an incorrect assumption. The same goes for software patents: economic studies (Bessen&Hunt, also in the overview I gave in my previous post) show that companies investing more in patents, invest less in R&D (the rest is spent on patenting and subsequently regained via rent seeking). They also show that the number of court cases is exploding (last slide).

An important fact to also keep in mind is that having patents an sich causes overhead. All money spent by the industry as a whole on obtaining patents, licensing negotiations, court cases, legal counsel regarding patents, etc is money that cannot be spent on R&D, customer service, etc. So having patents starts out at a loss, and it has to have really large positive effects to end up in the black again.

It's however doubly so applicable to software, because software innovation requires much less investment in materials, works with an idealised abstraction (rather than with finicky physical bits), and consists almost exclusively of incremental innovation. A.o., the FTC report and the report by the National Research Council cited above go into more detail.

Sure, but this goes to my later statement that software patents may deserve a shortened term. It doesn't support GP's argument that software needs no patent protection because, after all, it would get invented eventually.

It does support that argument, though it obviously cannot conclusively prove it. Where is your evidence that a shorter term is required rather than no possible patent attacks on re-inventors at all?

Here's a bunch of citations I once collected (note that it also includes a few opinions of political committees, but those are clearly marked).

Thank you for that... I'll have to read through them. Will get back to you.

Since State Street, there has been immeasurable innovation in the field of software. You've got nothing to back up this assertion.

I think we can indeed agree that software patents have not killed the software industry. That's however not a very strong argument if you claim that software patents are necessary or even helpful.

Yes, but it refutes GP's argument that software patents are bad per se. It's equivalent to an assertion that if we didn't have the death penalty, there would be a thousand-fold increase in the murder rate. Sure, that's an interesting thought, but there's no evidence whatsoever, so on its own, it doesn't really mean much.

The same could be said about any field of invention, including machines and compositions of matter.

It's however doubly so applicable to software, because software innovation requires much less investment in materials, works with an idealised abstraction (rather than with finicky physical bits), and consists almost exclusively of incremental innovation. A.o., the FTC report and the report by the National Research Council cited above go into more detail.

Sure, but this goes to my later statement that software patents may deserve a shortened term. It doesn't support GP's argument that software needs no patent protection because, after all, it would get invented eventually.

Well, you could read the claims of the patent. That would make it very easy to figure out whether your program is off the hook.

Of "the" patent? You mean of all the granted patents, right?

This was a reference to GP's argument that it was impossible to determine if you'd infringe a patent. Which I find a bit disingenuous, him allegedly being a patent attorney.

And actually, the risk of whether or not you infringe on a patent (software or otherwise) is simply not manageable in practice. How do I know? Because you cannot insure yourself against such risks. AIG, Lloyds and others have tried for a short while to offer such policies, and suffered losses up to 3000%! So if even those guys specialised in risk management can't determine the risk of infringing on a patent, what makes you think Joe the Programmer can do so with any degree of accuracy?

Joe Shmoe gets an insurance policy from Lloyds to cover him in case he infringes... At that point, he's indemnified. Therefore, he performs no due diligence, because it's expensive and he's fully covered against loss. I don't think it's particularly dispositive that people who are fully insured against any sort of loss act riskier than those who aren't.

Furthermore, while Lloyd's may be specialized in risk management, due diligence with regards to patents is another field entirely, requiring claim construction expertise rather than statistics.

Patent attorney here. Yes, software patents shouldn't be there. Patents are there to stop people from sitting on their ideas. Stopping people from sitting on their ideas helps society, because it give society more knowledge. However, for software there is no need for this mechanism.

[Citation needed].

Here's a bunch of citations I once collected (note that it also includes a few opinions of political committees, but those are clearly marked).

Since State Street, there has been immeasurable innovation in the field of software. You've got nothing to back up this assertion.

I think we can indeed agree that software patents have not killed the software industry. That's however not a very strong argument if you claim that software patents are necessary or even helpful.

There is no shortage of innovation because of lack of progress. If one person doesn't think of it, another one will.

The same could be said about any field of invention, including machines and compositions of matter.

It's however doubly so applicable to software, because software innovation requires much less investment in materials, works with an idealised abstraction (rather than with finicky physical bits), and consists almost exclusively of incremental innovation. A.o., the FTC report and the report by the National Research Council cited above go into more detail.

Well, you could read the claims of the patent. That would make it very easy to figure out whether your program is off the hook.

Of "the" patent? You mean of all the granted patents, right?

And actually, the risk of whether or not you infringe on a patent (software or otherwise) is simply not manageable in practice. How do I know? Because you cannot insure yourself against such risks. AIG, Lloyds and others have tried for a short while to offer such policies, and suffered losses up to 3000%! So if even those guys specialised in risk management can't determine the risk of infringing on a patent, what makes you think Joe the Programmer can do so with any degree of accuracy?

I'm not sure it's productive to reply to every point you made individually, but please let me address some of the main ones.

I'd say that the council of Ministers is at least as, if not more important than the Commission myself, after all it contains executive officers from all the member states, who will have to get directives through their respective countries legislatures. Secondly, the parliament did a good job of blocking Software patents recently. It has more power than you think.

Perhaps we'll just have to agree to disagree here. To me, it seems that almost everything major that gets dumped on us out of the EU originates with a Commissioner of some sort. Lack of software patents was perhaps an exception, but a rare and possibly temporary one. (Guess who was the EU Trade Commissioner, whose portfolio includes intellectual property issues, at the time that proposal started floating around?)

That's a Westminster problem, we could have an elected executive as in the USA, even so the Commissioners are no more removed than the Lords [...] Only the people of Sedgefield voted for Tony Blair, I don't remember people saying it was undemocratic that he was Prime Minister, or people complaining that because only the people of Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath voted for Gordon Brown he should been Chancellor, the same goes for all UK cabinet portfolios.

Well, I can't speak for others, but I certainly think it's undemocratic that our Prime Minister (and, by extension, the entire executive administration) is not directly elected. This is how we wind up with policies being implemented that are not supported even by a Parliament where the executive's political party has a majority.

As a personal preference, I would like to try a system where any government organisation that has any kind of legislative/regulatory authority or that is allocated a significant budget funded by the taxpayer must also have directly elected leadership. For one thing, it would be impractical to continue having the vast numbers of such organisations that we have today, so such a change would force government to consolidate, with each department having a clear mandate, and less opportunity to hide things or pass the buck. For another, it would be the end of the kind of abuses we've been talking about here, whether our own executive, the Lords or the EU Commissioners.

What part of Masstricht exactly do you oppose?

It's not Maastricht as such, it's Maastricht and the stream of follow-up agreements that created what we know today as the EU. In place of useful trade agreements and co-operation on human rights, which we already had anyway, we now have a body that costs us billions every year (though it is, apparently, incapable of ever producing any audited accounts to justify that) and that has undemocratic legislative/regulatory powers.

An appeal to the majority is a logical fallacy.

In logic, yes, but we're talking about representative democracy. There is no way to determine an absolute right and wrong, so we use an appeal to the majority as our best guess. If you can't convince a majority of the people to respect your position and values, you're not supposed to wield power on behalf of the people.

Personally I'm against referenda of any kind, except major constitutional change. I don't have time to read the Treaty of Lisbon, that's what I elected my MP and pay her to do

If you had read the Treaty of Lisbon, you might see the contradiction in your position here.

Is not the major benefit of a constitution that it creates a basic framework of rights and responsibilities, understandable by anyone and agreed by all, within which any delegated representatives must act? It is beneficial precisely because it is a safe

The Pirate Parties are quickly gaining ground in Europe, in particular among young voters. In the European Parliament there are now two Pirate Party representatives, and the Pirate Party got also one seat in the German Reichstag. Despite its rapid growth the Pirate Party is a fringe party that will only shape the debate. The Pirate Party aims for a 5 year protection period. Economists estimate the optimal copyright duration should be around 15 years. Richard Stallman criticises the reform vision of a fringe party which understands that governments are bound by certain international treaties, so five years won't happen anytime soon.

Stallman's other mistake is that he does not understand how software copyright protection works in Europe.

EULA's are something American and they are defunct in continental private law. They don't have the effects Richard Stallman describes.

Proprietary software is restricted by EULAs, not just by copyright, and the users don't have the source code. Even if copyright permits noncommercial sharing, the EULA may forbid it.

And someone who has a software service contract can actually request disclosure of source code to make modifications. Richard Stallman lacks imagination. If a party manages to get the copyright term down to 5 years, it will also manage to enforce a legal obligation to disclosure all source code of proprietary software.

In the current environment the situation is more that you bet on a party where you expect that they will not make copyright enforcement worse. Think of ACTA for instance, the transatlantic anti-counterfeit agreement. The real madness is international.

IBM is the #1 abuser of the patent system and invented the concept of patent trolling. Each year it is awarded thousands of garbage patents that cover nothing more than basic and very old ideas. IBM uses this portfolio of garbage patents to harass smaller companies into paying licensing fees. It costs millions to defend yourself in court against IBM, but IBM is typically willing to "do business" (i.e., not file lawsuits) for only a few hundred thousand dollars up front.

It's too bad to see the slashdot crowd so eager to buy into IBM corporate propaganda. Just this week IBM was awarded a patent on an internet-connected dishwasher. What will IBM do with this patent? Harass dishwasher companies for licensing fees of course.

IP most likely has nothing to do with it. It reminds me of a few years ago when someone (not really clear to me who thought it out) tried to push software patents in the EU via the agricultural council. That was AFTER it had already been voted away before.

Why isn't this illegal - adding unrelated legislation to a ? Is there anywhere in the world why this practice is not permitted, or better yet, prosecuted?

The GP is confusing a bunch of things. First, the Council of Ministers threw out all limiting amendments from the European Parliament and reached an Political Agreement on a shoddy text through backdoor maneuvering by Germany and the European Commission. That text would have turned the European Patent Office's practice of granting software patents into EU legislation.

A Political Agreement has no juridical nor legislative value, but it has never happened that a political agreement was later on annulled and that negotiations were reopened. So also in this case, even though the German, Dutch, Spanish and Danish parliaments afterwards passed motions asking to reopen the discussions, the Council's bureaucrats did not want to do that because it "would undermine the efficiency of the decision making process".

Anyway, once you have a Political Agreement (which is reached by the representatives of the ministries responsible for the matter at hand) and nobody "wants" to discuss it anymore, the agreement can be placed as an "A item" on any EU Council of Ministers meeting, since it only needs rubber stamping in that case. In the case of the Software Patents Directive, it appeared several times as an A item on the agenda of an Agriculture and Fisheries meeting (which is presumably where the GP's confusion stems from).

In principle, there would have been nothing wrong with that, but in this case there was no actual political agreement, and in particular Poland was very unhappy with the way it had been treated. So 4 times in a row, Poland either had this "A item" removed from the agenda (sometimes at the last minute, because the responsible Polish minister had to be informed that they were again trying to get it through at a meeting he had no business with), or turned it into a "B item", which means that it can't be rubber stamped but that they first have to talk a bit about it (which nobody wanted to do).

In the end it still did get approved, but that whole circus helped with in convincing the EU Parliament to table a resolution asking the Commission to restart the directive's process, and when the Commission refused to later on squarely reject it.

You can find some more of my thoughts on the Council's behaviour here.

Why isn't this illegal - adding unrelated legislation to a ? Is there anywhere in the world why this practice is not permitted, or better yet, prosecuted?

The GP is confusing a bunch of things. First, the Council of Ministers threw out all limiting amendments from the European Parliament and reached an Political Agreement on a shoddy text through backdoor maneuvering by Germany and the European Commission. That text would have turned the European Patent Office's practice of granting software patents into EU legislation.

A Political Agreement has no juridical nor legislative value, but it has never happened that a political agreement was later on annulled and that negotiations were reopened. So also in this case, even though the German, Dutch, Spanish and Danish parliaments afterwards passed motions asking to reopen the discussions, the Council's bureaucrats did not want to do that because it "would undermine the efficiency of the decision making process".

Anyway, once you have a Political Agreement (which is reached by the representatives of the ministries responsible for the matter at hand) and nobody "wants" to discuss it anymore, the agreement can be placed as an "A item" on any EU Council of Ministers meeting, since it only needs rubber stamping in that case. In the case of the Software Patents Directive, it appeared several times as an A item on the agenda of an Agriculture and Fisheries meeting (which is presumably where the GP's confusion stems from).

In principle, there would have been nothing wrong with that, but in this case there was no actual political agreement, and in particular Poland was very unhappy with the way it had been treated. So 4 times in a row, Poland either had this "A item" removed from the agenda (sometimes at the last minute, because the responsible Polish minister had to be informed that they were again trying to get it through at a meeting he had no business with), or turned it into a "B item", which means that it can't be rubber stamped but that they first have to talk a bit about it (which nobody wanted to do).

In the end it still did get approved, but that whole circus helped with in convincing the EU Parliament to table a resolution asking the Commission to restart the directive's process, and when the Commission refused to later on squarely reject it.

You can find some more of my thoughts on the Council's behaviour here.

Why isn't this illegal - adding unrelated legislation to a ? Is there anywhere in the world why this practice is not permitted, or better yet, prosecuted?

The GP is confusing a bunch of things. First, the Council of Ministers threw out all limiting amendments from the European Parliament and reached an Political Agreement on a shoddy text through backdoor maneuvering by Germany and the European Commission. That text would have turned the European Patent Office's practice of granting software patents into EU legislation.

A Political Agreement has no juridical nor legislative value, but it has never happened that a political agreement was later on annulled and that negotiations were reopened. So also in this case, even though the German, Dutch, Spanish and Danish parliaments afterwards passed motions asking to reopen the discussions, the Council's bureaucrats did not want to do that because it "would undermine the efficiency of the decision making process".

Anyway, once you have a Political Agreement (which is reached by the representatives of the ministries responsible for the matter at hand) and nobody "wants" to discuss it anymore, the agreement can be placed as an "A item" on any EU Council of Ministers meeting, since it only needs rubber stamping in that case. In the case of the Software Patents Directive, it appeared several times as an A item on the agenda of an Agriculture and Fisheries meeting (which is presumably where the GP's confusion stems from).

In principle, there would have been nothing wrong with that, but in this case there was no actual political agreement, and in particular Poland was very unhappy with the way it had been treated. So 4 times in a row, Poland either had this "A item" removed from the agenda (sometimes at the last minute, because the responsible Polish minister had to be informed that they were again trying to get it through at a meeting he had no business with), or turned it into a "B item", which means that it can't be rubber stamped but that they first have to talk a bit about it (which nobody wanted to do).

In the end it still did get approved, but that whole circus helped with in convincing the EU Parliament to table a resolution asking the Commission to restart the directive's process, and when the Commission refused to later on squarely reject it.

You can find some more of my thoughts on the Council's behaviour here.

What if Microsoft uses your stuff and makes a billion off of it ? OR you patent something (god forbid) and Microsoft steals it ? They hold all the cards. You can sue them, but they can sue you because you used their patented stuff to make your work.
Personally, I feel that any recognition of software patents is a bad thing, so while you are getting all excited, we in Europe are having the rug pulled out from under us. The EU council is already preparing to pass ACTA in secret thereby avoiding democratic debate. We don't want software patents. One-Click is bad enough, how is anybody going to learn programming if Hello World gets patented ? What happens to GPL'd code if patents take hold via the MS-PL ? I'm not aware of the BSD licence being used in patent battles, but it seems MS are actively encouraging people to patent their work, thereby giving MS free and total access (and control) to all of it.

Pure poison for truly open source.

The FFII has a page about ACTA including an analysis.

The FFII has a page about ACTA including an analysis.

The FFII has a page about ACTA including an analysis.

A bad software patent is a patent on software.

The way to solve the problem is reform of substantive patent law. In other words, donate to the FFII

Trademarks are different from patents.

There is only one efficient initiative and it is legislative reforms.

I would recommend to donate to the FFII.

I really wish people would stop repeating this myth that the UK (and Europe) are free of software patents. There many, many software patents here - you just have to write the patent in a certain way that gets around the very weak restrictions. See http://eupat.ffii.org/patents/samples/index.en.html for sample of these patents with summaries, from an anti-patent group.

When has the European Parliament and the public interest ever coincided?

Hum let me think ...
When it voted against the 3-strikes law for downloaders?
When it voted against software patents?
When it voted for restrictions on the use of radioactive weapons?
The EU Parliament can really hardly be criticized, except for the fact that it doesn't have that much power, which in my opinion is a real pity. Go troll elsewhere.

In case none of you know, the EU is pretty much a mislabeled dictatorship. Citizens of the EU have pretty much nothing to say about what goes on or who gets "elected" for this or that. Democracy, pah!

Eu is not the perfect democracy, we agree on this part. But saying it's a dictatorship where "Citizens [...]have pretty much nothing to say about [...] who gets "elected"", this is not true. The two legislative chambers are :

• The Council of the European Union, composed by the ministers of all EU countries. That's right you didn't vote for them, but you voted for a government that named them.
• The European Parliament composed by Euro-deputies elected by direct universal suffrage.

The EU is a very good idea gone horribly wrong.

That's Manichean. It's never a good idea to say "this is all {good,bad}". Some things are bad, some things are good. You speak like someone that lost everything.
EU isn't a lost cause. A lot of good things came from Europe. The fact that MEPs didn't vote for software patents back in 2005 (14 votes against 300+), the fact that MEPs adopted[1] the amendment 138 of the telecoms package (88% of MEPs votes !) and the commission accepted it[2], the fact that they adopted amendments aiming to reduce greenhouse gases (despite the huge lobbying of car manufacturers and oil vendors), etc. are all clues that EU can bring good things when people are watching.
Of course I'm not saying everything is wonderful, but I think that fixing what is broken is a better approach than just saying that EU is a dictatorship, let's burn all and start again from scratch.
I mean, we have to admit that even if it's not perfect, we have something working pretty good, and considering that to make one step, we have to please 27 different countries (used to be less, but it was still difficult), we can easily understand why it wasn't straight forward (We all know that many times, countries had important disagreements).

Media pay no attention to it either. What's going on in EU politics? You wont get it from the telly, the paper, or the generic news sites (though Obama is all over the place)...

That's partially true. classic media don't pay a lot of attention to Europa. That's probably the main problem, more important than the fact that people are elected or not. EU is too far from people. Nobody knows that EU makes that is good for them, but they always know what is bad for them. They even think that good things coming from EU are bad. Why ?
Well because EU is the best thing that happened to our national politicians. "I can't do this, see, EU voted that", "I'd like to please you, but I can't EU doesn't allow me to". This is the best excuse ever. So every time a politician screws up, he can say that's EU fault, thus making people hate it.
That's why we need to promote transparency (which is the subject on this article). We need to make EU closer to people. "Media pay no attention" ? Well, euronews speaks about it. Other media don't ? Well let's watch the good media then. Also we have to promote actions like La quadrature. Laquadrature watches EU when they vote something concerning freedom and internet. ffii watches EU when it's related to software patents, ACTA and so on. Very few people are watching them, it's true, but as long as few people keep watching them and alerts medias and citizen when needed, well there is still hope.

Give me the information and my 1/300m'th say in who our new EU overlords are, and I shall welcome them!

What is 1/300m ?
AFAIK, EU is 27 states and 500-M citizens.

[1] http://www.laquadrature.net/en/telecoms-package-european-democracys-victory-already-threatened

Yes, and Parliaments cannot see what is negotiated there, they don't even know the precise mandate of the Government to conclude this agreement and Eu bureaucrats admit that the objective is to impose IP enforcement regulation on "trade partners". According to EU officials part of it are civil and criminal sanctions for IPR enforcement and internet content filtering. The directive for criminal sanctions is currently stalled in the EU-Council because the EU level has no competence for that and the proposed measures were just disproportionate. And internet content filtering was kicked out of the Telcom package by the EU-Parliament after the lobby hijacked the telco regulation on committee stage. And sure the EU wants to export its IPR enforcement directive to the US. According to EU officials the reason of the pressure on the US side is that change was expected, regardless Obama or McCain and the anti-democratic trade nuts wanted to fix something before the change of administration. It is a kind of IP maximalist coup d'etat. Trade officials conspire to crack "down on piracy and counterfeiting" without any regard to proportionate legislation, balace of established law, democratic principles, the policies and principles of foreign trade policy as removal of trade barriers, etc. It is not the officials specialised on IPR policies who drive that but trade politicians who don't understand the current corpus of law and follow the principles of "more is better".

Now, ACTA is a maximalist tool, driven by ideological trade officials from many nations who want to jointly hijack the political deliberative process.

That is just the procedural stuff that is anti-democratic, anti-parliament, anti-expert, anti-constitution, pro-forum shopping, pro-maximalist, anti-free trade. The WTO and WIPO are not radical enough for them.

http://action.ffii.org/acta/Analysis

Patents, and particularly software patents, are a huge drain on tech industry and a net drain on society.

The vast majority of published research on this disagrees with you.

The vast majority? Have any references? Since I've asked you to provide some I'll provides some as well. Research on the MacroEconomic Effects of Patents lists about 40 studies. Some, like the first one, are about software patent specifically and it says "Software patents are serving as cheap alternatives to real innovation". Another says "firms may have plenty of incentive to innovate without patents and patents may constrict complementary innovation."

Falcon

I addressed that a few posts above, but I'll address it more thoroughly now.

From IT Jungle:
"According to sources at IBM, about 1,800 of the patents that were issued to Big Blue in 2005 were for software-related inventions... IBM says that the percentage of its patents relating to software inventions has been increasing steadily in the past few years. It was 51 percent in 2003, 58 percent in 2004, and 61 percent in 2005."

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Second, until patent reform takes place, this is the best IBM can do. Offer their patents to others wishing patent reform on software patents while at the same time making sure they are protected

Well, it's true that despite what changes are in store, you've got to play the current game as well as you can.

However, IBM is one of the strongest supporters of software patents, and has consistently been so throughout the history of software patenting.

Here is a transcript of USPTO hearings in 1994 - back when many industry players held Slashdot-like dislike for software patents. Even back then, IBM took a pro-software-patent stance and advocated for their allowance.

(Incidentally, that transcript should be required reading for anyone who wants to participate in this debate - IBM raised some extremely persuasive points that most Slashdotters don't like to acknowledge - such as: "We can't divorce computer program-related inventions from computer hardware and other microprocessor inventions. The overlap between the two is so great that cutting back on one automatically cuts back on the other.")

IBM continues to lobby in favor of software patents - particularly in the EU. From FFII.org:
"In the wake of the Opensource hype, IBM's rhetoric has become relatively moderate, but nonetheless it is supported by real pressure. IBM has acquired approximately 1000 European software patents whose legal status is currently unclear. Given the great number of software patents in IBM's hands, IBM is one of the few software companies who may have a genuine interest in software patentability."

From Ars Technica:
"IBM and OSDL to help Patent Office get organized"
This article is about IBM's contributions to the USPTO to help it improve its search tools, and in developing a Wiki-like system for allowing the public to participate in patent examination. This initiative is hardly about deconstructing the patent system - it's about sharpening and improving it, so that better-examined patents can issue.

And from Gartner:
"IBM Uses Patents to Lead Open-Source Community"
"IBM announced that it would open access to technology covered by 500 IBM software patents to any individual, community or company working on or using software that meets the Open Source Initiative (OSI) definition of open-source software (see www.opensource.org). IBM also proposed an industrywide "patent commons" for sharing patents among technology developers."

Note: This is not "donating patents to the public domain" or "abandoning patents." This is "using patents strategically to promote a particular sector of the market," i.e., the OSI crew.

In short - you couldn't be more wrong in your summary of IBM's position on software patents. IBM is a HUGE player in this space. They know how to get them, and they know how to use them well. They have consistently supported software patenting, from its mainstream inception in the 1990's and through today, and consistently lobby for expansion in terms of allowability, regional acceptance, and enforcement power.

- David Stein

Show me a company that hasn't been able to release a key piece of software because a competitor has a patent on it.

We'll never know, will we?

Show me a software company that has folded, or even scaled back operations, because of an adverse patent infringement judgment (AND where the patent was invalid due to novelty/non-obviousness, etc.)

I'm sure RIM wasn't happy having an injunction against them.

Show me any area of software research that has been crippled by any software patent.

Video compression. Unless you're one of the big players, you're effectively not allowed to participate.

Wrong again. Microsoft has actually argued for expanding software patent rights in Europe. Why would it do that if it regarded software patents as a loathsome burden?

Of course! Right now software patents can only be used to attack American companies. I'm sure they'd love to level the playing field.

Ridiculously incorrect. Enforcement of a U.S. patent involves a patented item or activity existing in the U.S. The nationality of the company is completely irrelevant.

If a Chinese company opens an American office and patents a software concept, they can pursue American companies that violate it. It is basically impossible for an American company to sue a Chinese company on their own turf.

In fact, non-U.S. companies have obtained patents in greater numbers over the last 15 years - both in terms of raw numbers (50,000 in 1994; 90,000 in 2007) and as compared with U.S. companies (from 43% in 1994 to 49% in 2007.)

You're bragging about the fact that we're unilaterally increasing risk to our companies at an increasing rate?

Riiiiight. Any evidence of this? Besides, y'know, a million posts on Slashdot asserting the same thing (also without evidence?)

Show me a company that hasn't been able to release a key piece of software because a competitor has a patent on it.

Show me a company that has admitted to staying out of a particular sector of software because of competing patents.

Show me a software company that has folded, or even scaled back operations, because of an adverse patent infringement judgment (AND where the patent was invalid due to novelty/non-obviousness, etc.)

Show me any area of software research that has been crippled by any software patent.

Hell - show me a Slashdotter who has not written a particular piece of software primarily because of a patent concern.

I'll bet that, aside from a few minor and tangential examples, you can't. Know why? Because that's not how patents are used - particularly in software. Licenses, cross-licenses, consortium arrangements, claim-centric design-arounds, and even old-fashioned "let's invent another way to do it"-ness abound. So do compulsory licenses (licenses granted to patents by a court against the will of a patentee) and business realities that discourage suing a small-fry competitor over a particular product.

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Do you think Microsoft really wants Joe Troll in Texas coming after them for 20 billion dollars because he patented spreadsheets? No! They see them as an evil that they have to put up with...

Wrong again. Microsoft has actually argued for expanding software patent rights in Europe. Why would it do that if it regarded software patents as a loathsome burden?

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American companies, or at least the intelligent ones, hate software patents because they're only useful against American companies. They don't do jack against the 95% of the world's population that doesn't live here...

Ridiculously incorrect. Enforcement of a U.S. patent involves a patented item or activity existing in the U.S. The nationality of the company is completely irrelevant.

In fact, non-U.S. companies have obtained patents in greater numbers over the last 15 years - both in terms of raw numbers (50,000 in 1994; 90,000 in 2007) and as compared with U.S. companies (from 43% in 1994 to 49% in 2007.)

- David Stein

IBM is on your lists for supporting software patents. They do not believe in them.

Wrong. IBM is an ardent supporter of patents, and has consistently argued in favor of them. And an increasing share of its business is based on software patents.

Rather, IBM's position is that it is against bad patents: those that are not adequately examined, and that issue despite invalidating prior art. IBM supports software patents just as ardently as electrical patents... so long as the patented invention is novel, non-obvious, adequately described, etc.

(And, really, who could oppose that position? Even though better examination lead to a higher rejection rate, they also lead to greater certainty in the validity of issued patents. In fact, the only opponent of this position is the USPTO itself, which throttles the amount of time and resources that an examiner can throw at an application in the interest of "productivity." I'll let you draw your own conclusions about that.)

...and most of the patents they are now putting through are hardware patents.

Also wrong (same article as above.) IBM's software patenting efforts have grown over the last decade.

- David Stein

Why is the parent modded down? It's the plain truth!

Thought, I should say that the parliement sometimes gets the things right. It was the parliement that stopped the patent law ( http://eupat.ffii.org/ ), proposed by the comission a couple of years ago.

Just thought this might help you poke a hole in that bubble you live in.

"The whole of Europe uses a unified system that permits such patents but forces them to jump through rigorous test to cut the crap that is patented in the US and that clogs up the US patenting system and cause endless costs and angst in the software community... See for a brilliant simple description : http://www.iusmentis.com/patents/software/epc/"

Unfortunately the Ius mentis description is dated and misleading anyway:

http://webshop.ffii.org/
http://legal.european-patent-office.org/dg3/pdf/t030424eu1.pdf

Charlie McCreevy never will. He was/is one of the people pushing for software patents also. I knew I recalled the name. He's also a liar (and the email's in the header - please feel free to sue me). He said this recently about the patent directive: "I've said all along is that what the original purpose of the directive was, was to codify the existing situation." [1]

Oh, and software patent opposition is born of "anti-Americanism and anti-big business protests" [ibid]. Yes, it's true. There is no other intellectual basis for it than xenophobia and irrational hate of capitalism. *sighs*

[1] http://wiki.ffii.org/McCreevy050704En

A lot of people.

Finland's EFFI demonstrated the overall level of vote-buying with their analysis of corruption levels in P countries.

Both the FFI and IBM rep present at the Swedish meeting protested about the vote stacking there.

In Portugal it was the Sun and IBM reps who lodged complaints because they were denied a vote due to a "lack of chairs".

Everywhere you look there have been a litany of complaints about vote stacking and rigging of committees.

Some European states' POs may be better than the USPTO but the EPO certainly isn't. The EPO grants software and business method patents and, like the USPTO, it has no qualms about enabling its customers to engage in speculative extortion: http://webshop.ffii.org/ and outright theft: http://www.ffii.org.uk/archives/28 (a theft of ideas outlined in the X Consortium's ICCCM standard).

Farewell then QT, rest in peace

Just as KDE was starting to look like a contender too. Coincidence?

Sorry I don't have mod points at the moment. Thanks for the essay link to http://deoxy.org/aip.htm

Our business plan is to soon provide an environment for free innovation (the customer is the inventor concept) and push the patent system into where it belongs, a harmless oblivion.

Copyright laws are still important though, as they care for software licences like GPL to not be abused. Regarding creative art, DRM is evil (I don't purchase DRM stuff) and DMCA is pure insanity.

support FFII.org, EFF.org and DefectiveByDesign.org

Don't forget that Frits Bolkestein http://eupat.ffii.org/players/bolkestein/index.en.html, is also member of the VVD.

FWIW, the guy is a big-time defensor of software patents, and calls open source advocates of misinformers (in the context of software patents).

Please correct your links about FFII Europe:

http://ffii.org/

http://eupat.ffii.org/07/12/amazon07/

AFFII is for United States

http://www.affii.org/ is for the United States.

Please correct your links about FFII Europe:

http://ffii.org/

http://eupat.ffii.org/07/12/amazon07/

AFFII is for United States

http://www.affii.org/ is for the United States.

At least in Europe it still works that way :)

In Europe huh? Really? http://webshop.ffii.org/