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My Large American Multinational employer has a similar scheme .... and every 6 months or so the scheme's administrators send out a company-wide rah-rah email talking up the scheme, its benefits for the company, and the m-o-n-e-y an employee will get for dreaming up a patent.

I just ignore them every time, cos it's i-m-m-o-r-a-l, and amounts to sickening bribery in an attempt to get you to participate in their thought-crime, and it isn't even clever - here's one my employer successfully filed : "A method for remotely administrating a computer by installing a web-server implementing a web form into which the sysadmin enters the commands to be executed using the web browser on her workstation" ...... oh please.

Propaganda :
http://www.softwarepatents.co.uk/intro/no_software_patents.html
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/intro/index.html

Paraphrasing the second link slightly :

"If [your country legitimises software patents], you will pay dearly. [The] software industry will fall victim to unscrupulous extortioners. A cartel of large corporations will crush smaller competitors. Consequently, we will all pay more money for less good and less secure software. You personally, your household, your company, your government, all of us."

I urge you to ignore these parasitic crooks in future, and refrain from taking their money. You'll feel better about yourself if you do.

Hehe funny... ...but seriously...
software patents have been a a reality in the not too distant past.. see here:

http://www.softwarepatents.co.uk/past/how_the_us_g ot_there.html

hey lookie here what Donald Knuth had to say on the matter.

http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/knuth-to-pto.txt

If the parliament had made no amendments to the original directive on it's first reading, we would then be at step 5, and this A-list item would indeed be the final stage.

Heres a (very detailed) link to the differences between the the parliament's and council's versions.

This is a better diagram of our current status. So all is not yet lost, even if the council does pass the may 2004 agreed version (their amended version of the parliament amended version), as it will have to go a second reading in the parliament, because of their changes. However, it's much harder for the parliament to introduce new amendments at the 2nd reading, making it basically a vote to kill the directive entirely, or pass the council version. Plus of course, it puts us one step closer to software patentability. Here is a link detailing the process. Note the hefty requirements the parliament have to meet in order to modify or kill the bill at it's second reading - and even if *that* succeeds, the council still has to agree to those changes.

After the Council of the European Union has sent its common position to the European Parliament, a time period of 3 months starts to run. If the Parliament does nothing within this time frame, the common position enters into force as directive.

The Parliament can extend this time by one month if it decides so.

If the European Parliament does not agree, is has to adopt changes to the common position or reject the common position, the latter would end the codecision procedure at this point.

To change or reject the text in 2nd reading, the parliament needs an absolute majority of the 732 Members for a yes on an amendment - for each change.


Of course, if the council have a complete change of heart, and pass the parliament sept 2003 version, it goes into law - but we're ok, as that version blocks software patents. But that would require reopening discussion, which the Commission has so far put pressure on to block, both in the council, and as a total restart.

Point of information:

The members of the European Commission are nominated by the governments of the member states. The nominees are either accepted en masse or rejected en masse - the Parliament cannot selec them or pick and choose them. They can force issues - like they did a little while ago - by threatening to reject the entire Commission but that's about the extent of it. On the other hand, the Parliament has the power (and my God do they use it) to reject the Commission budgets.

On the subject of the democratic deficit in the EU - I have just this to say: the Commission is the executive branch. I don't know where you are, but what happens in this country is you have a general election, and the side which manages to string some kind of a majority or sufficiently big faction together nominates a prime minister and he gets to choose the government. We don't directly elect members to the cabinet. The type of European Commission we wind up with is directly attributable to the kind of government each of the member states elect - it works more or less the same way.

Finally, at least the MEPs are battling software patents. As far as I know, it's the Supreme Court landed software patents on the US. See http://www.softwarepatents.co.uk/past/how_the_us_g ot_there.html

As far as I know, the average US citizen can't vote judges to the Supreme Court.

Recent empiricial research suggests patents are even less successful in software. This is because software is different. Or search for "while statement" here. To illustrate cumulative innovation complexity-wise, the 2.6.8 kernel has 300,000+ IF statements, a BMW sedan car has a complexity of "only" 15,000-18,000 pieces (Mr Blabst BMW press department), a typical drug consists of 10-100 atoms.

In other words, the position that there are fields of human activity that the patent system is not so well tailored for is well-defensible even without killing the entire patent system.

Sidenote: there have been a lot of quirks and surprises in the past with the Software Patent Directive, so get prepared to the thought that next week's Brussels/Berlin demos are still needed and useful politically (only one scenario of total fiasco has hopefully been avoided, there is not yet a renewed referral in Parliament nor B-iten in council).

UK patent application GB0312175.3, someone already tried:

"The applicant appeared to be trying to protect the use of '0' and '1' in computer technology. [...] The applicant appeared to have completely misunderstood the patent system, and had not actually invented anything."

Via softwarepatents.co.uk. Well, at least *that* didn't get through. ARM's patent on the use of pointer arithmetic in CPU emulators *was* allowed, though.

You think that's a joke? Someone tried to do that in the UK, patent application GB0312175.3.

Read the end of this.

The ARM patent is discussed on softwarepatents.co.uk, scan down the page to "Patent GB0025696.6". Basically, it's a patent on a method for speeding up CPU emulators. The method in question is "instead of copying memory buffers, why not just copy around *pointers* to those buffers?". This is apparently innovative and technical.

I encourage everyone who plans on attending to keep in touch with FFII-UK; if you're not sure where we currently are, or the problems with the Council directive, they are the people to ask. The UKPTO sent out their one-sided biased view of the directive, get the other side of the story too.

The real question is how to fix the patent system. IBM (ie. PA Fritz Teufel) pressures for EU software patents. up to now they were successfully defeated. However, in order to gain ground we have to expand the European Campaign to the USA. And there it is up to you, create an initiative that puts pressure on the patent system with assistance of your FTC.

We can support you, bring the software patent war home!

http://www.noepatents.org
http://wiki.ael.be
http://swpat.ffii.org
http://softwarepatents.co.uk

I would also like to remind you of UN World summit Of the Information Society. It may be the right place to raise the issue.

That's the case, but politicians don't see it. Hence, we need to educate them. In the UK, there are some sites specifically about the situation: FFII have a UK page, and then there is softwarepatents.co.uk. I imagine at some point there will be some kind of co-ordinated campaign to educate people in time for the vote in the Autumn.

Europeans, please do something. Phone you MEPs on Monday (or leave a message today and phone again on Monday).

Patents are going to ruin the software industry by handing even more power to the companies that have vast bank accounts and legal team (i.e. the ones that really don't need this extra power).

Read about the affects of patents at:
http://www.softwarepatents.co.uk/

Read the UK patent office's "consultation on software patents":
http://www.patent.gov.uk/about/consultations/concl usions.htm

Examples of bad or missused software patents:
http://www.base.com/software-patents/examples.html

Bad EU patents that have already been issued:
http://swpat.ffii.org/patents/samples/index.en.htm l#pag
(these aren't really enforcable until software patents become clearly legal)

A good proposed amendment:
http://swpat.ffii.org/analysis/epc52/index.en.html
(tell you MEPs to look at this, we have to unite with a definite proposal. Simply saying "we don't want software patents" doesn't give an MEP much to say)

Use the phone. Email is easily ignored. You'll often get answering machines so think of a short useful message to leave, mention the proposed amendment and tell them your sending them an email with the details.

Ciaran O'Riordan

The proposed directive was written in a Word file, and the original author information appeared in the metadata - that's how they know the BSA were involved.

I thought Arlene's response was more anti-Free/Libre/Open Source Software than anything I've seen in a long time, and it's bizarre because rms and Nick Hill didn't raise that issue at all. Her article wasn't factual in any way, shape or form - she said she was against business methods, for example, but offered no actual example of actions which back that up - in fact, her previous actions indicate she's in favour.

Useful URLs for people in the UK: FFII UK, More info on software patents. We can still stop them putting these things in place.