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Europe Votes Against Software Patents
BrightIce writes "It seems like things are getting better in Europe regarding software patents." The text of that article is in German, but thanks to Sebastian Bunka of Austria for providing me this translation: "On the CONVENTION ON THE GRANT OF EUROPEAN PATENTS all 20 memberstates have
decided to not change the regulations to the patentability of software and
to allow by this basically no patents on software." Else, you can check the fish, but the above is a better translation.
i'm in the business of making money from my code, so i like being able to protect my product and my I.P This decusion makes it almost imposible to do that now, and that can only damage the growing IT market across the EU.
An excellent troll. You're conveniently forgetting many things - firstly, that copyrights protect your ideas from 'theft' in the largest respect. Secondly, that pure mathematical algorithims are still patentable - unlike in America.
While you might moan about 'protection', you'll find that most patent holders are large multinational corporations like IBM. How fair is it to find that you infringe some vague patent of theirs? How fair is it if you publish an innovative image processing method in a journal, then someone else patents your idea, and tries to charge you because the patent office is too fucking lazy to read the appropriate journals?
How can you dare innovate in a market based on fear, uncertainty and doubt - at any time, some IP company with no products of their own comes to sue you because you inadvertently stepped on a patent landmine? Does your product have multitasking? That's illegally patented in the EU. So are CGI scripts on a Web server. So is hardware emulation used for software testing. Breaking down pathnames into directories and files is patented!
There is no doubt in my mind that software patents cause more harm than good. The copyright law, contract law and trade secret law is sufficient protection for software. Using patents on software is an abuse of the patent process.
Does my bum look big in this?
The whole schebang has to do with "European countries' collective political determination to establish a uniform patent system in Europe." Note, though, that from trawling through Europa earlier today, I get the impression that the final aim - a European Patent - has not yet been reached. So for now, member states signed up to EPO, it may be assumed, will amend their national legislation to match the EPO resolution.
It should be "Useless Corrupt Tw*ts at the EU Finally Manage to do Something Right, but it was Probably an Accident."
Unfortunately, the European contries are at least as xenophobic as US, probably more so. Just about all EU contries have political parties whose main agenda is to keep foreigner out. These parties usually get about 10% of the vote, sometimes more (like in Austria). They have a huge influence as the mainstream parties try to adopt their politics in order to compete for the same narrow minded part of the poulation. In Denmark, all the popular parties compete on who can be toughest in foreigners, and the most popular stories in the media are about criminal foreigners or decendents of foreigners.
Of course, "foreigner" does not include other EU citizens, or even North Americans. It is only Moslems and Africans and poor people in general who "we" want to keep out.
1) Celcius. That whole Farenheit thing is stupid. It makes much more sense for the temperature of water to freeze to be 0. I don't want this Farenheit B.S. anymore.
2) Metric system. All of our cars (that last more than 3 years) are built using this system of measurement. Our cars have kilometers per hour below miles per hour. Our drugs are measured in this system. It is a much easier system to remember, and is much better organized than the crazy crap we use.
Forgive me if I'm wrong, but wasn't this already attempted once before? If I remember correctly, I think what happened was that a bunch of morons started shooting down roadsigns, etc.
Not that I'm saying that it'd automatically be doomed to failure, if it were attempted again. I'm just saying that you should wait for that sector of the population to die out before attempting to reimplement metric.
A much better idea would be to start replacing existing signs, etc., with a dual system, whereby information is listed in both imperial and metric.
Even then, I wouldn't be too optimistic. Forgive my Canadian bias, but Americans just don't seem all that flexible in this regard. It would require changing school curriculum, and seeing as what's taught to children appears to be a somewhat taboo topic.. (just look at the arguments over creationism) I doubt you're going to be able to get the population to change, unless something drastic happens. (And I mean something drastic. Look how little came of the Columbine shootings; instead of going after the source, or trying to figure out the truth, you see the media and the police demonizing a whole innocent sector of the population. I get the sense that, even if something on the scale of Golipoli happened to a group of Americans due to an imperial/metric mixup, they'd find some way to shrug it off as a result of poor schooling by their teachers, or blame it on the shoes they were wearing.)
In the meantime, if you're interested in moving to a place that uses metric, I should point out that Canada's always an option. We've had metric for a good while now, and for a lot of us, it's the only one we know. (Although there are quite a few imperial mainstays. There's a tendancy to measure peoples' height in feet and inches, still, and the same with building materials. But other than that, and meat being weighed by the pound..)
If you would like to know more about (software) patents (and you ought to if you if you are in the software business and live in Europe), here is some links:
SSLUG (Skåne Sjælland Linux User Group) has created an article called "Software patents - No thanks!". You can find it here.
"The EuroLinux File on Software Patents" also has a lot of information right here
Greetings Joergen
This is concerned with EU law. Not national law.
There is nothing to stop any country in Europe enacting a law about software patents.
In any case, the good news is actually no such thing, since software patents already exist in Europe; for example, the lzw patent, which affects gifs, plus many thousands of other software patents, are effective in many European countries (mainly Britain, for strategic, rather than legal reasons).
Free Anne Tomlinson!!
Ok, so the EU have ruled against Patents for Software. I'm still confused about the whole legal aspect of patent infringement, and how whatever "International Treaties" that may exist affect this area of the law.
Let's say I start a computer software company here in England, and my product includes a feature that is the subject of some silly United States patent. Can I freely market that product everywhere but the United States without fear of being chased by the patent owners lawyers?
If so, and I then decide I do want to sell into the United States, can my "license fee" then only apply to copies sold in the United States?
Or what?
Regards,
Confused of the Thames Valley, United Kingdom.
Boy, I'm sure glad there is some good sense in this world. We're finally getting politicians to understand the blatently dangerous consequences of patenting software. What's next? The United States? Ye gods, I hope so.
And let's not go off and start up about this only effecting EU. Because you have to understand the international treaties are two-way streets. I mean, America isn't the only place where if a law is enacted, other countries follow. EU has a lot of influence, and this is definetely good news, even in America.
I would have liked to see them extend this wisdom to bio patents, but unfortunately they decided not to discuss that.
Good to see that European politics sometimes DOES make sense :-)
Bruxelles, Copenhagen, London, Madrid, Munich, Paris. 2000-11-22. With the exception of Austria, Lichtenstein and Switzerland, all European countries voted in Munich yesterday against an extension of the patent system to software. The exception on computer programs will be maintained in the European Patent Convention after its revision. This move is a clear victory for democracy, since it allows the European Commission to proceed with its public consultation on software patents, together with the European Parliament. National governments in Europe which are currently reviewing in detail the pros and the cons of an extension of the patent system to software, will also be able to participate the debate.
Nicolas Pettiaux, belgian representative for the EuroLinux Alliance of software publishers and non profit organisations, warns however that "yesterday's vote should not be interpreted as a vote against software patents, but rather as a vote to postpone any decision on this matter until the consultation launched by the European Commission is closed". But, according to Stéfane Fermigier of AFUL, member of EuroLinux: "the General Directorate for Internal Market at the European Commission, which is in charge of the consultation, has approached the software patent issue with an ideological point of view. Both their interpretation of the Law and their call for the consultation are obviously biased in favour of software patents. Furthermore, until very recently, they paid no attention to the economic effects and to other side effects of software patents, as they should have according to the Rome and Amsterdam Treaties. We are still very far from a decision to ban software patents in Europe."
Future EuroLinux actions will be targeted at convincing the European Commission to take a balanced approach on software patents. As the FFII/EuroLinux Software Patent Horror Gallery shows, the European Patent Office is already abusively granting many patents on pure software methods. Such kind of patents are then cancelled by national courts in case of dispute. A clarification is still needed in Europe, either in favour or against software patents. EuroLinux considers that software patents should clearly be banned in Europe because they harm innovation and that software should be protected through copyright.
ReferencesEuropean Patent Office - http://www.european-patent-office.org ;
Software Patent Horror Gallery - http://petition.eurolinux.org/examples Statements for Software Patent Free Europe - http://petition.eurolinux.org/statements The EuroLinux Public Consultation - http://petition.eurolinux.org/consultation
The EuroLinux Petition for a Software Patent Free Europe - http://petition.eurolinux.org
The EuroLinux File on Software Patents - http://petition.eurolinux.org/reference
First, GPL code is protected by copyright, and thus, your companies code is too, you are just
forced to allow it to be copied under certain conditions.
Second. I believe if you release the code under GPL, you are automatically giving a license to anyone who wants to use/modify the released code
(the code is still under GPL of course)
Relevant sections of the GPL:
From the Preamble:
Finally, any free program is threatened constantly by software patents. We wish to avoid the danger that redistributors of a free program will individually obtain patent licenses, in effect making the program proprietary. To prevent this, we have made it clear that any patent must be licensed for everyone's free use or not licensed at all.
Further down under the terms and conditions section 7:
If, as a consequence of a court judgment or allegation of patent infringement or for any other reason (not limited to patent issues), conditions are imposed on you (whether by court order, agreement or otherwise) that contradict the conditions of this License, they do not excuse you from the conditions of this License. If you cannot distribute so as to satisfy simultaneously your obligations under this License and any other pertinent obligations, then as a consequence you may not distribute the Program at all. For example, if a patent license would not permit royalty-free redistribution of the Program by all those who receive copies directly or indirectly through you, then the only way you could satisfy both it and this License would be to refrain entirely from distribution of the Program.
You should probably get advice from a lawyer before depending on this.
(I didn't mean to post the last one anonymously.)
I am opposed to patents in general, but it would be less of an issue if people were more honest about what patents are for. Cloaking patents in terms such as "property" confuses the issue. The goal of patents is to promote innovation by giving inventors exclusive rights to their inventions for a limited amount of time. If it's admitted that patents are an attempt to increase innovation, we can discuss them on pragmatic grounds: where are they needed, what qualifies as sufficiently novel, what the terms should be in particular instances, and so forth. Instead, because of the word "property" a lot of people are convinced to believe that there's somehow an inherent right to a patent of the same degree as the right to own personal property.
If there are going to be patents at all, I don't see any particular reason why a patent couldn't apply to a particularly innovative software-based mechanism if it's determined that that's what's needed to encourage innovation. But the rules should be analogous to those for hardware inventions; software patents as they exist today undoubtedly have the opposite effect. Part of that is because of the incremental innovation that's so common in software, where using components as building blocks for other components is a common method of construction, and part of it is due to the proliferation of really trivial patents that just create barriers.
However, even if the goal is to be stimulation of innovation, we should look at it more closely; merely stimulating innovation doesn't necessarily result in progress. If people are stimulated to merely seek slight variations on the same theme in order to grab a patent, it isn't terribly productive, and likewise if people have to spend a lot of time working around existing patents.
Having studied EU law, I can tell you that at present there is no harmonization. In particular, a judgment of the [ECOJ] court in 1994 affirmed that Article 113 of the EC Treaty *did not* cover intellectual property.
Since then, Article 133 has been introduced, but this only covers intellectual property disputes, and not law per se.
Free Anne Tomlinson!!
Nice to see that not all governments are entirely brain dead or totally owned by corporations.
There are too many stupid patents being granted. There's even a patent for using a flashlight/laser pointer to play with a cat! I kid you not.
Now the EC needs to strike down the horribly Tony Blair RIP bill that not only allows police to raid your computer for data, but makes it a crime not to hand over your encryption keys on request.
=== The price of freedom is eternal vigilance
This decision is actually only temporary. The EU is waiting for the end of a large consultation which should end december, 15. As such, the EU decided not to precipitate. But the issue is not solved yet.