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More on European Software Patents
pdajames writes "An article at ZDNet UK says that the EU bureaucrats aren't even considering the numerous anti-software patenting opinions out there. According to a well-connected lobbyist group, they have determined there will be patents, and the only question is what kind."
Then, rewrite him with extensive informations, if possible comments of small companies, etc. Sorry my own links are in French ;-) but I'm sure you could find many links against software patents, with models letters to send to your MEP, etc.
Another good method is to check some (already granted, even if near illegally) EU patents, and send a mail to the potential affected companies you could know.
One thing with EU patents is that the majority of people, developers and companies, absolutely don't know about them, and when asked about, they absolutely don't know the potential risks of software patents. So pattents lobbiers carefully presents patents as a good thing of course.
The only thing to do then is to spread the information ! we only have 2 months !!
IANAL, but wouldn't this mean the patent is effective for 27-30 years instead of 20 years, as the 'invention' still has protection while it's pending? And if the IP firm working the system can come up with enough variations, alterations, and improvements they can keep the patent from being issued indefinitely. What a bonus!
The simple fact is that IT moves too damn fast for software patents to be anything other than nuisances at best and corporate genocide at worst.
I'm going to mail my MEPs about this and I hope that any other Eurolanders checking this thread out will too.
One of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors - Plato
The argument against software patents is made on three grounds:
1. the products of the software industry are so large and complex (because of the lack of physical constraints) that the scale of 'invention' is hundreds times greater than in the physical world.
2. patents are expensive (10k Euro in Europe) and rarely can small businesses or individuals afford to aquire them.
3. even when people overcome point 2, they find that the large patent portfolios of large companies render their patents useless.
Conclusion: large companies purchase patents in order to protect not their inventions, but their competitive advantage. Since innovation comes from smaller teams, patents thus work against innovation.
Software patents exaggerate what is a manageable problem with physical patents, and turn it into a serious problem for smaller designers. Basically patents allow large businesses to collaborate with burocracy to create barriers against the entrance of smaller groups.
This is bad, corrupt, and economically stupid.
End of argument.
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As I see it the problem with software patents is that it will mainly affect open source projects which are easy targets for patents (obviously you can search through the source code) and in most cases don't generate profit. Closed source projects in most cases done purely for profit will probably slip through the net if they infringe a patent because the source code if far from accessable. Surely, it is the second instance which you would want to protect your work from?!?! The other problem I see is that many of these patents seem to have such broad definitions masses of innovation will be stiffled because a patent will encompass wide areas of work!
The French patent office is supposed to be the strictest in the EU. Yet they let completely obvious patents slip through. I've met a person who once spent a few days crafting some totally ridiculous patents, just to show how very lax the French patent office already is. (One of the patents was for business information systems software, where the "innovation" is that the CEO can get the average of the prices of his company's wares). This person said that you can get basically anything patented like this:
I repeat, this is for the French patent office, supposedly the strictest of all. If you think about it, patent offices have an interest in granting patents, not rejecting them. Why? After a rejection, the applicant will come back and haunt them for explanations, apellations, etc. After a grant, any contests to the patent is done in court, which makes it Somebody Else's Problem from the POV of the patent office.
So don't say it's solely the Americans that screwed up and we'll do better. The basic economic pressures working on the patent office are exactly the same.
Europe doesn't center around the UK/USian one where courts directly or indirectly create laws by interpreting the constitution
Not really sure what you mean here. From here
"In relation to sources of law, clearly the French constitution is the principal source in France, contrasting sharply with the UK position.
Secondly, all legal systems define laws to some extent through precedent - if the original law is ambiguously worded, then its exact meaning is defined generally through its first usage in court.
The US system has shown itself incapabable of judging what the state of the art in software is. The European legal systems aren't all that good either - take the Berlusconi and Chirac immunity cases for example. So why should anything be better in Europe?
Say, for example, that Microsoft made some clever algorithm that improved their .DOC file format and patented it. This effectively gives them a complete, legally mandated monopoly on word processing for the lifetime of the patent (which is huge compared to the lifetime of software). Nobody can produce an interoperating program without violating the patent or paying a huge licensing fee. How does this help anyone other than Microsoft?
Software is relatively cheap. I would raise an eyebrow at any company which said it has invested millions of dollars in researching a new software "technology". It's not like you have to buy lasers, or break apart pieces of DNA to aid that research.
This is all irrelevant anyway. The real theft in my opinion is the patent system. I find it offensive that I can independently come up with a software idea only to find that somebody has "done it first", and therefore they own all rights to the use of it. This isn't even a rare occurrance - there are an enormous number of trivial and even complex software patents out there which any number of people could have come up with independently, with or without research. I personally have thought up countless algorithms indendently which all turned out to have been already patented (including natural order spreadsheet recalculation, parts of LZW, some specifics of voxel rendering). There are an enormous number of people out there who can and probably have also. It is absolutely fucking ridiculous that my efforts at furthering the art are in fact being constantly restricted by the very process that was setup to encourage it.
Even worse, the original inventor will go out of business because the thiefs don't have the development expenses, so that they can offer the products much more cheaply. And patents are there to prevent such stuff.
The software patent system has always been and still is used solely for the purposes of protecting against other people invoking patent law. This is recursive, and boils down to being pointless. Products which are protected by patents inevitably end up being more expensive to the consumer, simply because the company has been granted a monopoly. Worse, a company granted a patent doesn't even have to sell anything. They can just sit back and collect taxes from anyone crossing over their piece of land grab.
Many people fear that stuff like Amazon's one-click patent and other trivial patents will come out. But I don't think this is a real problem. Such trivial patents are cause by a fucked legal system.
I don't think the triviality of a patent is relevant at all. I don't think I can identify any piece of software which at the very least hundreds of other developers around the world could also have come up with. This does lend a certain amount of uniqueness to the situation with software patents. The legal system problems are not the cause here, they're the symptoms of the wrong model and wrong premise being used to solve a problem that doesn't exist.
sorry - repost. Forgot some tags in my other post making it unreadable. Should have used that "preview" button ;-)
EU is becoming a dictatorship, with the bureaucrats making more and more laws
You will find that while the European Commission, whose members are choosen by the States and not elected, propose many of the EU laws, they have to be approved by the European Parliament to become law. They also have to be approved by the European Council, made up of the ministers of the relevent domain (ie financial ministers, agricultural ministers, trade ministers depending on the law proposal) from the 15 states.
It's a complex system, but not undemocratic: all the actors involved are either directly elected (MEPs), members of elected national governements (The ministers) or choosen by national governements (members of the EU commission). Hardly a dictatorship.
And the citizens don't even have any chance to proclaim their opinions, i.e. there are no EU-wide elections
Excuse me, but I thought EU citizens voted every four years for their MEPs, who go on voting on EU law poposals? Does that not count as an EU-wide election?
Of course, that does not prevent industry lobbyists from pushing hard for the passage of laws in their interest, but sadly this is a practice all too frequent in the world. Without the EU, it would simply take place at a national level in much the same way.
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I can see the problem of Software Patents in the EU from another point of view: if there will be no Software Patents the EU will suffer extreme pression from Bush administration (a.k.a. USA) to introduce such. USA will obiously claim that EU is posing a threat to Intellectual Property, etc. and all such bullshit. /.), then the Bush administration won't be able to come forward with such absurd claims.
On the other hand if the EU introduces SANE software patent rules (such as quoted on
May the Source be with you!
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If patents can be issued for software then software should only be sold with the source code provided so that the publisher's competitors can verify that their intellectual "property" has not been pirated. There would no longer be a need for source code secrecy or non-compete agreements since ownership could be easily determined, after years of litigation of course. Even with this "protection", I'd bet that the same large companies who are pushing for software patents would be afraid to allow other patent holders to examine their code.
I work in a research lab in the UK. One time we considered patenting one of our techniques. We took legal advice and were warned that once we did file the patent, there was the chance that other major company or university would file any number of counter-patents. If we advanced the technology in any way, we would risk making a patent violation. Essentially one or more companies would file a handful of patents each based on slightly modified versions of the original patent. Eg. If a patent was filed on a particular shape of brick for driveways (this has happened), competitors would file patents on the same brick for patios or pavements, and/or file patents for slightly modified shape of brick for driveways. The only people who will gain from this (or any new legislation) are the lawyers.