Slashdot Mirror
EU Moves Towards Single European Patent Standard
theodp writes "A European Parliament committee Tuesday moved toward setting the first pan-European standard for software patents, but outlawed the U.S. practice of patenting business methods, such as Amazon's one-click Internet shopping. 'The European law sets the right benchmark rather than the looser U.S. system,' said the director of public policy for Europe at the Business Software Alliance, which represents 20 software companies including Microsoft and Apple. Amazon representatives in Brussels declined to comment on the new European legislation."
He meant, "the European law sets the right benchmark rather than the loser U.S. system."
(Yeah, I know. I have no plans to quit my day job.)
It sounds like they have learned from some of the mistakes our
patent system has made.
Under the European law, software companies would obtain
exclusive rights only for programs that demonstrate novelty in
their "technical contribution."
Their reasoning: "We don't want to arrive at a model where
in the U.S. everything under the sun can be patented,"
I think they are approaching this from a better angle. I still
disagree with the general notion of patenting algorithms as
such. I don't think algorithms are invented any more than
mathematical truths are invented, rather they are discovered.
IMO, there is a difference and a patent shouldn't be granted on
that. Although, I will admit there is room to disagree with
that position.
It looks like they will be avoiding the major abuses we are
experiencing though, since you can patent a novel approach to
hand writing recognition, but not hand writing recognition in
general.
Now, the question is how do we get the U.S. government to adopt
this standard? Will it be like the Metric system, where we are
too entrenched to switch to a better system? Let's hope not for
our sakes.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
Unfortunatly, this report, from the Legal Affairs committee, does support software patents, ignoring the advice of the Industry committee, the Culture committee, and the vast majority of the response to their public consultation on the issue. Luckily, there is still time, as it has to pass the European parliament before coming EU law. So, to all European slashdotters, please make sure to contact your MEP about it (in a coherant, non-loony way) and explain why software patents are bad.
...is the software industry leaving the U.S. in droves for less litigious countries.
This is not my sandwich.
Cute how its dressed up, but its telling that its the big players that want to lock themselves in with Patents who are backing this.
We had the most innovative time when there were no patents and lockins. Now the software market is dead, because the OS vendor locks the market down. Giving them more lock down tools in the form of patents is death for applications software.
No applications are developed, nothing new is in the market and it has nothing to do with patents, and everything to do with market lock.
Yeah, you got it.
Claus
This is a wide-open door through which even the most rediculously obvious software patents could (and therefore will) slip.
Please please please don't let yourselves think that this is anything other than the EU getting a patent system open to virtually all of the abuses demonstrated in the US.
I just sent the following to my MEP, find your MEP's email address and contact them NOW before it is too late (people in the UK can find their members here)!:
The following is (c) wikipedia, GNU Free Documentation License.
Patents originated in England with the Statute of Monopolies 1693 under King James I of England. Prior to this time, the King could issue letters patent providing any person with a monopoly to produce particular goods or provide particular services. This power was widely abused; thus Parliament restricted it through the Statute of Monopolies so that the King could only issue them to the inventors of original inventions for a fixed number of years. Section 6 of the Statute refers to "manner[s] of new manufacture...[by] inventors", and this section remains the foundation for patent law in England and Australia. The Statute of Monopolies was latter developed by the courts to produce modern patent law; this innovation was soon copied by other countries.
You know, there already were laws prior to the Declaration of Independence and the drafting of the Constitution..
SCO employee? Check out the bounty
This is not actually good news, despite the spin. Software patents are absurd, and this still basically hands Big American Corporations (TM) the European software industry on a plate.
/. a while back - I find it scary that the West is busy building castles of I.P. in the sky, while its native manufacturing base is dissolved. When all the West "has" is information,less than pieces of paper and infinitely copyable, and the billions in India and China have all the factories, then we'll see how much real value I."P". has.
On the sorta-plus side, in the long term, the very concept of I.P. might be pushed closer to collapsing under its own weight. The USA and now the EU are deluding themselves if they think that China will continue to honour Western I.P. laws for ever. To echo a post on
Choice of masters is not freedom.
The European Commission has proposed to override the current clear and uniform European patentability rules (Art 52 EPC: "mathematical methods, schemes and rules for mental activity, methods of doing business and programs for computers are not patentable inventions") and replace them by a confusing set of nationally implementable rules which authorise patenting of algorithms and business methods, as it has been practised at the European Patent Office (EPO), openly since 1998 and more or less covertly since 1986.
The "European Parliament committee" cited in the article is the European Parliament's Commission on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market (JURI). Some members of this comittee submitted amendments to the European Commission's software patent directive proposal. While some Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) are asking to bring the directive in line with Art 52 EPC so as to clearly restate that programs for computers are not patentable inventions, another group of MEPs is endorsing the EPO's recent practice of unlimited patentability, shrouded in more or less euphemistic wordings.
What happened Tuesday is the vote of some pro-software-patenting amendements by the JURI. Theese amendments will now be presented to the plenary of the European Perliament for decision during the first week of either july or september.
It's definitely VERY BAD news.
This site summarizes the situation and the efforts from all around Europe to fight software patenting.
Since I am trying to patent some stuff right now, I actually know a thing or two about patents. I'll try to straighten out some of the questionmarks and misconceptions that seem prevalient.
In Europe, the patents can be issued for the entire union from the central office. This is much more expensive than in the US, primarily because everything has to get professional, technical transaltions into three langauges. However, even though the patents are issued for the entire EU, they are actually enforced locally in each country. Different European countries have different criteria and standards, the same patent may very well be ruled to apply in one country but not in another. I think the article deals with some guidlines regarding software and business methods; I don't believe it will change the overall picture and it should be seen in that context.
Some quick points about software and business methods in the US. In general, for these to be patentable, they must fulfill the following (these are some of the important conditions in lay mans terms):
-It must be new, in other words no records that anyone has ever done it before
-It must provide a tangible benefit - pure mathematics or very abstract and general algorithms do not work
-It cannot be obvious, even to professionals in the field
-The inventor must demonstrate that he or she actually knows how to implement it (preferably by doing so)
- The patent is only valid for the implementation that the inventor describes
These are actually quite reasonable conditions, wouldn't you say? I have not read the infamous one-click shopping patent, but note that generally speaking it is not possible to patent "shopping by only one click", you have to describe how you do it, and the patent is only valid for that implementation. Of course, sometimes it is possible to be quite general in the description, such as "save the customer's info in a memory, recognize customer by a cookie, initiate transaction based on saved data when customer clicks shopping button". On top of that the one-click patent is questionable from the obviousness criterium.
I wish to point out, however, that the set of patents that get discussed on Slashdot are the examples of extreme outliers when it comes to obviousness and generality. Frequently they are also misunderstood and exagerated, either by the original magazine, the story submitter or both.
For example, a few weeks ago there was a story on Amazon patenting selling used items next to new ones. A dozen people got 5, insightful ratings for pointing out how crazy this was. In fact, the patent only covered a specific technique of soliciting new sellers (or something similar).
Tor
I don't think algorithms are invented any more than mathematical truths are invented, rather they are discovered.
Well, every invention is just a 'discovery' in some sense. I mean, take for example child-proof caps for medicine. Someone 'discovered' there was a way to make a cap that wouldn't open unless pushed. Someone 'discovered' that making a tire in a certain shape would pull water off the ground and make driving safer. Someone 'discovered' that you could setup transistors in a certain way to make double data rate DRAM. All of these are discoveries as much as something like realizing that you could delete audio information that would be filtered out by the brain as a way to save space.
The important thing in my mind is to filter out the 'obvious' things from the truly innovative. It's 'obvious' to use base-64 encoding in DNS for international domain names. 1-click shopping is 'obvious', etc.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
But the concept of patent appeared about 500 B.C. in the Greek colony of Sybaris. The Sybarites, who enjoyed living in luxury, made a law that if any confectioner or cook should invent any peculiar and excellent dish, no other artist was allowed to make this dish for one year. He who invented it was entitled to all the profit to be derived from the manufacture of it for that time.
On a side note, the earliest English letter patent known is dated April 3, 1449. It was granted to John of Utynam for his art of making colored glass.
This article is a lie of the Patent lobby. Ask the free software foundation Europe or FFII to learn more about these persons.
FFFII has the real story. Nice Quotes from HÃ¥kon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Inc, Richard Clark, CEO of Elysium Co Ldt and chief editor for the JPEG standardisation committee, Bernd Runge of SAP AG, Bernhard Kaindl of SuSE GmbH, Dr. Karl-Friedrich Lenz, professor of Public Law and European Law, Aoyama Gakuin Daigaku, Tokyo, Jozef Halbersztadt, patent examiner at the Polish Patent Office and others.