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Business Software Alliance Writes European Regulations?
Holger Blasum writes: "The European Commission's proposal for a directive on software patents making software patentable in Europe is announced today (the commission's proposal still will have to pass council and parliament). MSWord's "Author" field suggests that it comes straight from the BSA's director of public policy. See the Eurolinux press release for a brief summary, more details can be found at the FFII website. Or, if you
prefer French, zdnet.fr has some coverage too." The EC's site has several webpages about the proposal: a main page, FAQ, and the official copy of the proposal. Comparing the proposal-as-released with the draft obtained by Eurolinux, many sections are identical, some sections are nearly identical and a few sections have been completely rewritten.
It's just a proposal, which may not pass at all if the politicians have any braincells left from their champagne brunches etc. well who am I kidding here..
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Just sign the petition if you haven't done this
petition agains European software patents
I live in the USA, where corporate interests hold no sway over our politicans. Clean up your act, Eurpoe!
A couple of months ago I attended a conference on EU IP law as applying to the IT business. The EU Patent Office director was there himself, plus business representants and government officials.
Among other points, that EUPO director admitted to giving out software patents without any legal basis whatsoever.
Also, these officialls were quite obviously loaded very pro-patents. Noone questioned the 20 year duration (hell, thats 3-4 whole generations in IT), and my question about that was answered in quite a ridiculous way: "well if that seems too long for you, you can just drop your patent by not paying the fees any more...".
These guys also were smart enough to ask how many people were pro-patents, but not anti-patent - which of course I had to ask afterwards - the obvious 50/50 result (these were almost all lawyers and practically no techies) was then called "well about 1/3 against only".
Next chance I get to talk to the minister, I'll sure try to express the Free Software point of view. But since I'm from the smallest EU member country, I doubt that will have much weight, even if I can help to convince the higher-ups...
This nice shot in compination with the bottom of this page.
Just when it looks like the US might be realizing it's gone overboard with copyright and patent law, now here's a proposal to have the EU copy everything that's gone wrong with US IP law.
I thought originally patents were supposed to cover mechanisms. In the loose sense of the word, I suppose an algorithm is a mechanism, but *not* like Eli Whitney and the cotton gin, for crying out loud! In early landmark cases like Apple vs. Franklin (1983; Apple sued Franklin Computer for copying the ROM's on the Apple II+ directly to make a clone), the courts applied *copyright law*, not *patent law*. (Apparently you can only get a patent on generic ROM chips, not on ROM chips programmed a specific way.) The court used the (at the time) new Copyright Act of 1976 (which IMHO was much more reasonable than the DMCA is now!) to frame their decision. Unfortunately, the Lotus 123 case (Lotus vs. Microsoft), the Pentium name trademark case, and the Apple vs. Microsoft case, the courts significantly eroded copyright's ability to provide meaningful protection to software. So I think that's why companies have turned to software patents, because legally speaking, they're much more intractable. (Although there was obviously prior art for ripping off people through patents, e.g. LZW compression which *wasn't even original* (it was a derivative of the earlier LZ compression), yet was awarded a software patent.
Anyway, this is unfortunate, but it doesn't surprise me that the BSA would be pushing software patents. After all, they're the same people who estimate "sales lost to piracy" by counting the number of PC's sold without Windows and Office and ASSUMING that everyone having one of those PC's (a) really *is* running Windows and Office, they just pirated it, (b) would have paid for it to begin with. Plus they send threatening letters to companies telling them that "the BSA police might come knocking on their door," while simultaneously telling disgruntled employees to turn in their employers. Nothing like a little backstabbing to make our lives easier, eh. Oh well, the world is full of scumbags. Just my $0.02.
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Windows 2000/XP stable? safe? secure? 5 lines of simple C code say otherwise!
Copyright. The correct form of intellectual property management.
Prepare for rant:
Software patents are evil.
If software patents had existed 20 years ago, the concept of the spreadsheet would have patented, the concept of a word processor would have been patented, the concept of a database would have been patented.
Software patents do not encourage creativity.
Software patents do not encourage the sharing of novel ideas.
Software patents stiffle comptetion.
Software patents make work for lawyers.
Software patents will kill this industry.
Now, I don't know about you, but I find a lot of this stuff in my desk drawer. Why, several people have made copies of cdroms crammed full of various programs and offered it to me for only the price of a blank CD!
The astute reader will have already caught my drift by now and realized that with Linux and the GPL (and all the other OSI licenses) you don't ever have to say sorry to the BSA. So why not taunt them? Report yourself today!
Actually, before someone jumps up and says something, let me point out that I don't think that reporting yourself to the BSA is really a good idea. It's like walking up to a 300 pound thug and saying something nasty about his mama. But we can dream, can't we?
:Peter
Don't take my word for it. Instead read this article from a couple years ago in Mother Jones magazine. It talks about how BSA offices end up pushing licenses for MS products even on companies that weren't illegally using them, but in fact were using other (competing) products.
For fairness, here is a link to a follow up letters column that disputes some of the facts in the article.
Quite an eye-opener.
This is something I've always wondered about. If you get a software patent, you have a government granted monopoly on that for ~20 years - at which point it becomes public domain (when the patent expires everybody can reproduce it - this is the whole point of patents). What happens if that software is also copyrighted? Does the turning over to the public domain trump copyright? Does copyright trump patent law? How can something be an invention (patentable) and also speech (copyrightable)? Does anyone know? Is elvis dead?
Jon
In the computer age of patents, you wouldnt patent a lightbulb, you'd patent a 'Method of Producing Light By Artificial Means', and simultaneously patenting every method of artificially producing light.
You wouldnt patent a specific way of copying paper, you'd patent 'copying paper', wether done by hand, by photocopier, by taking a photo of the paper or by typesetting it and printing it several times.
Patents no longer cover specific methods of doing things, they cover every way of achieving a specific goal, something never intended by the idea of patenting in the first place.
Even assuming you have a patent office staffed with geniuses gifted with eidetic memories, software patents mean that _every programmer_ must know the _entire patent base_ (6-7 figures already), and keep up (hundreds of applications per day)! Since this is obviously impossible, every piece of code ever written becomes a ticking time bomb of patent litigation. In American civil court, these cases take years (sometimes decades!) and cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars to defend.
They are, in short, nothing other than a naked gift to large companies, with no demonstrable or even plausible public benefit. They are a versatile weapon, with which Microsoft, and a few others, can bludgeon their competitors and enemies.
I was shocked to see the EU contemplating them... but apparently things aren't so different from one hemisphere to the other.
We're on the road to Tycho.