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Euro Software Patents: Stay Of Execution
Mr. Adequate writes: "The European Patent Office finished its diplomatic conference in Munich today. According to the press release, the non-patentability of software will remain unchanged for another year. Then the fun starts again. In the meantime, European Slashdotters could do worse than to voice their concerns to their EU representatives, sign the petition, and of course support the fledgling FSF Europe." The process certainly didn't rule out software patents, just said they're still thinking about it.
I'd like to say thank you for pointing to this list, as I was signing it and see the results I realised that the total number of signatures was increasing by the second. Was about 6035 at the time and rises steady like a for loop.
:> And probably a chance, whatever tiny, to show a different point of view.
It has to be the nicest Slashdot effect I have seen.
The Screen Savers on TechTV had a visit from Larry Tesler (developer at Xerox PARC and of the Apple Lisa) yesterday, you can see it in RealVideo here. Seems the Xerox Star had windows, but not overlapping windows, only side-by-side ones. The screen they had on the Star was huge, big enough to easily fit two documents on one screen. The Lisa's screen, however, was much smaller... so, to do any windowing of any sort, there had to be overlapping. And it stuck with the industry.
Ironically, this aired just after I gave a presentation in one of my classes on the Apple Lisa and its place in computing history....
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Good judgment comes from experience.
Experience comes from bad judgment.
I know this is slightly off topic (whack! slapping my wrist).
I just bought Mirco$ofts (whack! slapping my wrist again)Flight Simulator. On the CD it says (translated from german):
It is illegal to make unlawfull copies of this disc.
So, even Micro$oft has to admit implicitly that there are lawfull ways to copy their CDs.
No.
The introduction of overlapping windows, as done by Apple, most probably would have been enough to qualify as a new innovation. Besides, Xerox, not being a computer/software company, would not have been very interested to go after innovations similar to its patents.
Now, Apple having such a patent (on overlapping windows), that would be a completely different matter. If you're old enough, you'll still remember how aggressively Apple's legal department was by suing a whole lot of companies, just because they tried to learn from the Apple UI. Do you remember the discussions if UIs may be protected by copyright? I do - obscure lawsuits on every nitty-gritty details happened all the time.
Now, imagine Apple let loose with the power of a patent, and not just with copyright claims. They would not only be able to go after those who learn from their UI, they could also go after those who do their own original work - it just needs to be similar enough by having overlapping windows.
The advantage of not having MS Windows today would simply not outweigh the disadvantages.
Joachim
People don't write Manifestos any more -- what's going on in this world? [Frank Zappa]
I submitted a patent on "Posting to a weblog before all previous posters". Unfortunately the prior art research turned up an older application that said "First Patent"
The proposal has been put on ice -- where with any luck it will freeze to death.
I say that's good news. I don't care whether it dies of apathy or whether it dies because I signed the petition, as long as it kicks the bucket!
No, your children are not the special ones. Nor are your pets.
I don't live in Europe, and I bet there are a lot slashdotters who don't reside in Europe too.
So, what can we do to help?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
We are taking the narrow position that all software patents are bad. If you think otherwise, then would you please name a few good software patents?
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Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
You can't do a search for prior art - you'll have to search the entire internet (and more). When searching for prior art, the Patent Office only uses their own database! At least that is what is the practice in Denmark.
Patent's are supposed to give other developers access to your inventions, but have you tried to read a patentdescription? Patents are written in a languange which "only" patent lawyers understand, therefore the average developer will not be able to benefit from the patent databases - they simply don't understand it.
Patents mostly don't benefit the small companies because the big companies often will have a many more patents, which you maybe are using without knowing it. Furthermore big companies has much more money and (probably) better lawyers I would also like to argue about whether a patent on "window display system" would have been good for innovation. What if the World Wide Web, the graphic click-able, interface of the Internet as we know it had been patented? im Berners-Lee who invented it, has said: "If the technology had been proprietary it would never have taken off. The decision to make the web an open system was necessary in order for it to become universal".
For further information, take a look at these links:
The EuroLinux File on Software Patents
Even though software patents mostly isn't possible in Europe, many softwarepatents exists anyway - take a look here and I bet you will be shaking your head: European Software Patent Horror Gallery
SSLUG (Skåne Sjælland Linux User Group) has written a good article here: Software patents - No thanks!
Freepatents.org
Greetings Joergen
The EU already issues patents on software, 15% of UK patents being granted now are software-base. The debate is about the critera for a patent.
In the uk a pantent on software must be a new and non-obvious, this is a bit better in the rest of the EU where a technical effect must be demonstrated, so a disk cache program would be parentable, but a image view wouldn't be.
find out more at the UK patent officethank God the internet isn't a human right.
Here are two petitions[...]
http://swpat.ffii.org
http://petition.eurolinux.org/
Fortunately, the FFII is linking to Eurolinux instead of starting their own petition.
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Men with no respect for life must never be allowed to control the ultimate instruments of death.
GW Bu
This was more than a vision; they showed off hardware and software, built by his team from scratch, equipped with some element of virtually every system we use today: the computer mouse, the graphical user interface (visual display of text and graphics), windows, networking, a Web-style browser to fish up information out of cyberspace, e-mail, even video conferencing. "It was one of the greatest experiences in my life," recalls fellow pioneer Alan Kay. "Engelbart was like Moses opening the Red Sea."
from http://www0.mercurycenter.com/svtech/news/special/ engelbart/part4.htm
But what if, more interresting for the patenter, someone had patented the fact to use metaphor of the reality in a virtual system, covering windows, but also every computer model of part of the world, and as such, preventing everybody to do something useful with computer without thinking really laterally.
They also should account for the likelihood that patents won't be granted decently. The USPTO does a sorrowful job of researching prior art.
I think we should go back to the 19th century as far as copyright: copyright terms should be on the order of 10-20 years. If that works OK, we could try reducing it to 5 years or 2 years.
Of course this would be incredibly difficult politically, since, e.g. Disney believes they are permanently entitled to profit from the copyrights on Winnie the Pooh, whose author is dead.
Business models in which a service is sold alongside the free information [...] can solve special cases, but not the general case. Suppose there is no service capable of generating sufficient profit margin to support the information-generating activity?
No social system is perfect. The current, historically unprecented level of IP protection has its success stories and its failures. What we should keep in mind is that the concept of property is a social construct, not something ordained by God. Some Native American tribes had different concepts of land ownership than the European invaders. In the U.S., private property used to be a category that included human beings. Maybe someday our great-great grandchildren will look back with horror on the idea that in the old days, information could be owned.
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Your argument seems to be totally baseless :)
They don't reward innovation as much as they encourage other companies to innovate.
If one way of doing something gets popular (windowed GUIs, or gas powered cars, for instance), then every company will copy that way (Mac OS, Windows, X Windows on linux and bsd, did I miss anything?), since they're guaranteed to make some money. If that way of doing something was patented, then the other companies would either have to pay royalties or find a better way.
The other companies would have to find a way to "put a square peg into a round hole" because they'd have to, otherwise they would lose profits to the first company with the patent.
This works if patents are used decently. Companies who patent everything in sight, or patent the obvious (Amazon and Rambus) just hurt the industry by preventing companies from making or doing anything without paying royalties for the patents.
The time limit for technology patents does inhibit the industry. Someone can file an obvious patent, some moronic patenter signs it, not really knowing what it is or means, and an entire section of the industry is paralyzed for 20 years. 1 or 2 years should be the maximum.
AMAZON
One-Click Shopping was probably NOT already in common use. So what justification does a proponent of software patents have against Amazon getting this one? Obvious is a very slippery concept.
WINDOWING SYSTEMS
Okay, say Xerox Parc enforced patents on its windowing systems. Instead of being a good thing, consider that instead it may have stifled the eventual convergence of windowing concepts that we take for granted now. (e.g., Imagine Ford claiming patent rights on putting a steering wheel on the left and the gas pedal on the floor. Do you want all the other carmakers to think "laterally" and innovate their own man/car interfaces?)
It is tough to justify intellectual monopoly rights when the details are considered.
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Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
Who said corporations behaved decently? Lawmakers should plan on a worst-case scenario, where people attempt to abuse the law to within an inch of its life.
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We're not really celebrating, just relieved that the situation has not gotten any worse for the time being. The European Patent Convention specifically excludes computer programs from patentability, but a few years ago the EPO decided to ignore this exclusion and start granting software patents anyway.
What they did was to argue that a computer program with a technical effect is not a 'computer program as such' and thus the exclusion does not apply. Of course, any important algorithm or technique can be said to have a 'technical effect'.
So we have the situation where patents are being granted, but possibly illegally. The enforceability of these patents is doubtful. The EPO would like to change the written law so that it matches the creative new interpretation, making software explicitly patentable (and making the patents already granted more likely to be enforceable). Any move to do this has been put on hold pending the European Commission's consultation.
The eventual aim is to reinstate the law as it is written, so that computer programs (whether 'as such' or 'not as such') are not affected by the patent system.
What you can do: reply to the consultation (download the consultation paper in PDF format, you might also want to point out flaws in the accompanying economic study), sign Eurolinux's petition, and contact your national representatives. In some countries (eg the UK) national patent offices are holding their own consultations.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
But when biotech companies are being allowed to patent human genes, who really cares about software patents?
Jeebus
I agree with you in principle, but there are severe problems with today's implementation of patents. Mainly, the time scale is way, way off.
Instead of giving innovative companies a small head-start to recoup their R&D costs, 17-year patents give them a competition-crushing, innovation-stifling monopoly for the entire lifetime of their products.
Consider that if Apple had patented the windowed GUI back in 1985, the patent would still be in effect today. That means not only no Windows as we know it, but no GNOME, no KDE, no BeOS, no 4DWM, etc. Un-licensed GUI efforts would have been utterly stifled until two years from now! I guarantee you that in such a world, graphical interfaces would not have advanced anywhere near where they are today. (Also note that Apple continues to make a hefty profit from its inventions without patent protection)
I say we should return the patent system to its original purpose. Restrict patent terms to half of a product's projected useful lifetime: enough to give companies an incentive to invest in R&D, but not enough to stifle innovation in vital areas. Terms could vary according to the type of patent; I'd have no qualms with, say, two-year software patents, or six-month business model patents.
Dan
- http://swpat.ffii.org
- http://petition.eurolinux.org/
Also, here's an excellent information resource on software patents that I found really interesting. Software patents and their evil brethren (UCITA, for example) must not be permitted if the consumer is to have any control over the software they are paying good money for!--
"Give him head?"
All right, but did anybody ever get forced to use the window paradigm in their GUI, just because it was not patented by Xerox ? Nowadays it's more or less compulsary to have windows (not Windows :) )
in your GUI, because people are used to it ; but
back in the days when GUIs weren't commonplace,
everybody could develop radically different GUIs
and still hope that it would get widely used. Of course
it was much easier to just borrow some ideas to
the Xerox PARC design, since it was not patented,
but still...
My guess is that there aren't that many different, more efficient alternatives to windowed GUIs. If you disagree, please provide references to those "dream UIs" I don't know about, I'd like to give it a try...
How about UNIX? I saw someone using it in Jurassic Park, and it used neither windows nor command lines.
Given person A who's come up with an innovative idea and person B who has not, you're claiming that patents are necessary because in giving A a monopoly on the idea, it will force B, who's shown no aptitude for coming up with innovative ideas, to start doing it.
It makes more sense, logically, to disallow any and all patents. B then copies A's idea, and A, not B, is the one forced to come up with another innovative idea- A, not B, is the one who's shown an aptitude for doing just that- and A, not B, is the one publically credited with originating the idea that becomes widespread and popular.
What on earth gives you the idea that granting A monopolies on ideas will produce more innovation? Nothing will make B innovate- not everybody _can_ innovate, see Microsoft as exhibit B- and giving A patents only gives A an excuse to _stop_ innovating and hire more lawyers. The whole concept is quite stupid and based on a nice friendly notion of 'everybody can do this if they only try' which is nonsense.
Its not publishing that is the deterrent cost, its creating the information in the first place.
I've been following this debate for many years now. I have great sympathy with the idea that IP laws stifle innovation. But I have yet to see any explanation of how we pay people for creating information without them.
Answers to this question generally fall into two categories:
Paul.
You are lost in a twisty maze of little standards, all different.
If the EU eventually rejects software patents, they could go one step further and contest US software patents as non-tariff trade barriers. In fact, any GATT signator anywhere in the world could bring such an action before the World Trade Organization.
The proprietary software industry is attempting to standardize worldwide treatment of patents in their favor because, if they don't succeed, the pendulum could come back to bloody them.
I mostly agree with you on that one...but there are a couple of issues on that one which are going to be hard to solve satisfactorily. First, it is tough to come up with objective AND fair criteria which can be used to decide whether a particular innovation is worth giving a patent to. One might argue that the currrent set of rules is sufficient for the task, but see how much room it leaves for subjectivity. Second, to do a really good job, you need people from the relevant field who can provide an informed opinion without being biased themselves. Finding such people is awfully hard, since we all have some fixed ideas about what is good and what is not. This is also a big resource issue-- I don't think the patent offices have the kind of money to employ so many experts... However, having said that, I do agree with you that some sort of patenting is essential if we want to keep promoting innovation. I have been recently reading about a concept called "idea futures"(http://hanson.gmu.edu/ideafutures.html)in which it is proposed that scientific
research evaluation be opened up to the market
since this not only prevents an elite few to
have the power to guide and shape current opinion
but also allows markets to promote ideas which
are more feasible, in the view of the market. I
am not sure how this directly relates to patents,
but I think a combination of the two might provide
an interesting and refreshing perspective at
the very least.
Just my two cents....
Did you hear about the mathematician who named his dog Cauchy because it left a residue at every pole?
I am working on a social sciences report sadly titled "The social impact of legalisation of software patents within the European Union".
It isn't finished, however I would appreciate comments, and I hope you can find it enjoyable in some way.
Oh here is is.
No, it's not true because it was in a movie, it's true because it happened. Maybe "stole" isn't the best way to describe it, but Xerox PARC did come up with it first, and Apple did get information and a couple of engineers from PARC to develop the Lisa and the Mac. Just because it was in a movie doesn't necesarily mean it isn't true to some degree.
Big business likes patents because how else can you collect money for doing absolutely nothing? And what Big Business wants, Big Business usually gets, like it or not.
I used up all my sick days, so I'm calling in dead.
If you want more history, here's a cool factoid for you: Galileo invented open source. What I mean by that is that he invented a kind of analog computer (sort of like a slide rule), and instead of charging lots of money for each machine, he sold them cheaply, but charged for instruction in how to use them. Sorta like the business models of lots of Linux companies now, huh?
Another example is that the French revolutionaries abolished copyright, leading to the total collapse of the publishing industry, except for scandal sheets and pornography. This is usually quoted as showing we need copyright, but the same conditions don't apply now. Then, the reason publishing ground to a halt was that it was expensive to publish something, and you couldn't justify the investment without a guaranteed monopoly. Now, publishing is potentially free.
I think the morals of these historical facts are that (1) that society is not as dependent on IP laws as you might think, and with weaker or nonexistent IP laws, people would just find alternative ways of doing business, and (2) technology really has made a lot of IP law obsolete.
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I know that the main thinking here on /. seems to be, IP=bad, patents=bad, business=bad. I would tend to disagree. Patents, when applied correctly, help innovation, rather than stifle it.
Before you mark this down as a troll, or flamebait, let me explain. Imagine if the first windowing display system for computers had been patented. Most people I hear give credit for this to Mac, but not being a strong computer historian, I don't know. Whatever company came up with this, if they had patented it, would have had a large advantage over others. Some would say that this would mean the other companies would go under, and that Macs would dominate the desktop.
I believe, however, that this would have forced others to think more laterally. Given the choice of giving in, or coming up with a new display system, (not windowed), it is doubtless that a myriad of display systems would be developed. Some would suck. Some would rock. But there would be new ideas tried, new technologies developed.
My point here is that if people want to influence the outcome of all of this, start lobbying for how and why patents are issued. Patents for things already in common use, (i.e. 1-click shopping), don't help anyone. But don't let the ineptitude of the USPO let you think that ALL patents are bad.
I got kinda worried reading this from the text ( what about software is not "technical"?):
"As before, computer-implemented inventions can be patented if they involve a new and inventive technical contribution to the state of the art. Technical solutions for use in data processing or for carrying out methods of doing business therefore remain patentable.
This follows from the concept of invention itself, which draws a clear distinction between technical solutions and non-technical methods. On this basis, patents cannot be granted for computer programs or business methods which are not of a technical nature."
Patents strip us of a basic freedom. They do not reward innovation, they reward a large legal department. The legal minefield they create is as big an obstacle to innovation as I can imagine.
I'm sorry, but your suggestion that patents encourage lateral thinking is absurd. The scientists in Apollo 13 put a square peg into a round hole because they had to, not because someone patented round pegs. gzip and bzip2 compress better than compress. PNG is superior to GIF. But they'd be better if they had been developed without regard to patents. bzip was created to do better compression. bzip2 was created because bzip infringed on a patent on arithmetic encoding.
Oh, good.
Technical solution for use in data processing: Access a database from a GUI across a network. (The substance of an obnoxious patent discussed here previously).
Technical solution for carrying out methods of doing business: One-click ordering.
What are we celebrating again?