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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."
European software developers have already had to spend a great deal of resources just getting to the level of their head-started American peers (I exclude certain rather effective German companies), now they need to be spending more money and time (if you think the US patent agencies are slow, wait till you have a taste of European bureaucracy) to establish timelines for the development of different technologies in order to keep these safe from other overzealous patentees? Also, with an industry as ubiquitous as software, how will European and American patent laws interact and interfere with each other?
In the new world order...
I will continue to hope that progress will be made in the way that societies handle 'intellectual property'. I don't think that any amount of lobbying could possibly end the month of june with the EU not having software patents. Given the political power of corporations in the US and the EU there seems to be no place for free thinking when money might be changing hands due to the outcome of the policy. There will be an EU patent process for software. Open Source Software will continue to adapt and grow while the corporations attempt to twist the judiciary and governments of the various countries of the world to get what they want... more money.
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Are there any surveys that show that the majority of europeans support this SH**??
We live in a democracy?! WHY HAVE THESE F*CKING COMPANY-LOBBIES MORE RIGHT THAN THE CONSUMER THEY SHOULD SERVE???
Are our governments finally infiltrated by the corporate mafia?!
Sorry for ranting. But I think its pretty clear.
I'm feeling helpless. One notes the unfair situation here by the amount of argument the anti-software-patent-side has to do to let the politicians just LISTEN to their arguments. The pros say: Hey we need software patents because they are good for the economy. And the economy is good for you. Period.
And the politicians follow. Uhhhh....
Maybe I should grow up. Maybe I shouldn't bother. This is clearly the wrong forum to say that, I know...
But where else?
It does not surprise that the European Parliament is taking this attitude! We keep harping on the
Americans and how they let certain laws through. The reality is that politics is not about democracy, but about people keeping themselves in power.
This is reaching almost epic proportions because the politicians think those demonstrating and calling themselves anarchists are in the minimum. I am thinking more and more, are they really in the minimum? Is the talk of anarchists not just another comment to discount opinion that does not fit into the overall scheme of things.
To give you an example consider the following. Bill Gates can have dinner with Tony Blair. Gehard Schroeder can have dinner with Juergen Schremp. When was the last time either of them had dinner with Joe and Jane from the street? Of course I mean not during voting season. This is the problem. The elite are serving the elite!
And it is getting worse everday! Open Source does not fit into the scheme of things, because Open Source is not about being elite! See there's our problem! When was the last time Tony Blair had dinner with Linus, RMS or Eric Raymond? When was the last time any politician met with any Open Source person?
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
One of those assistants told me he's never seen such an enormous amount of public attention for a proposal in the two years that he has worked at the European parliament. He thinks there's actually a very good chance of preventing this proposal from getting approved. Really, it's easy to say "all politicians are alike" and "corporations own the politicians anyway" etc, but that's simply not true (note: I'm not a member of any political party nor politically active, except in cases like this). Yes Virginia, there still are a lot of people with a conscience in politics who want to do the best for society at large, they just need access to the right information. In cases like this, people like us can make the difference.
If a non-programmer or non-ip-lawyer reads a proposal like McCarthy's, I can perfectly imagine that it's not that difficult for that person to be convinced that she's indeed trying to protect the software development community at large. The background text of her proposal is really full of misleading and sometimes outright wrong statements to justify her goals.
For example, she cites one study which shows that software patents are beneficial to small and medium-sized companies. In the same footnote, she states that they also looked at several other studies, however, at least one of those concludes exactly the opposite. Nevertheless, the way it is put forth in her text, it seems as if all those studies show exactly the same results. There really are a lot of things like that...
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If a company does some real research in computer science then it invests millions of dollars and severals years of time into the development of new technologies. However without a strong system to prevent IP theft, any jerk company can come and steal those technologies. 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.
And copyright isn't strong enough for protection in such a case. The thiefs can get the technology by reverse engineering. But they are not copying the code, just the technology. So IP laws won't help and you cannot detect the reverse engineering unless some whistle blowers come out. Which is rather unlikely.
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. This is a well-known USian problem. But not a European one. Europe centers on the French system where the creation of new laws is dominated by legislation. Europe doesn't center around the UK/USian one where courts directly or indirectly create laws by interpreting the constitution. Remember that the patentability of business methods in the US came primarily from a court ruling. Europe simply doesn't have this problem.
So, I don't see why we shouldn't have software patents here.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
Should software patent laws pass, I request everyone to fight against those laws, even with civil disobidience. EU is becoming a dictatorship, with the bureaucrats making more and more laws, and the EU members are then _forced_ to make them national laws, else they're sued (yes, the countries!). And the citizens don't even have any chance to proclaim their opinions, i.e. there are no EU-wide elections. This is clearly dictatorship, with laws made by only a few, and hardly any rights to intervene. This should be fought with every force possible, even with civil disobidience!
EU: should the software patent laws pass, then this means war!
signed, an angry EU citizen
A monkey is doing the real work for me.
Actually only one commisioner was shady but the parliament has the power only to sack the entire commision at once, not individual commisoners. Therefore they all voluntarily left before that happened.
No, what needs to be stopped is the American PAtent Office's (implicit) policy of 'if it hasn't been patented, it must be priginal/patentable.
Simply because someone hasn't found it in a patent search does NOT mean that a competent person in the field couldn't invent it.
'Obvious' appears to have become meaningless in the world of patents, and that is one of the large reasons that software patents are so insidious-- Much of what is patented is ludicrisly obvious.
Furthermore, the term of a patent (especially for software, where there is little investment in developing a new algorithm) is too long.
Even if you have someone working on something for a few years, the investment made for a software algorithm is orders of magnitude less than that for many other inventions.
Remember, the -original- purpose of patents was to encourage people to invent! All that requires is an adequate return on your investement-- if the return is 'too good' (or too long), then it ends up harming innovation.
The original patent system was implimented so that if a person were to make a discovery or invention, it would be advantageous to that person to obtain a patent, publishing the details of their discovery, instead of keeping the method a secret in perpetuity. Clearly, if the greatest inventions are kept secret, nobody would be able to build off of them, and technological progress would stagnate.
So, how about we allow software patents, under the condition that the SOURCE CODE for all patented algorithms be placed in the public domain? Corporations would then not be legally allowed to make money on them due to patent law, but society as a whole would benefit by the non-profit use of the source code, allowing software technology to continue to progress without having to rediscover old code.
Clearly such a patent should be limited in duration, much moreso than patents on other stuff -- say, like 4 years or so? What do you think?
However, software isn't an implementation, it's a notation in a language that ultimately can be understood by a computer (probably after some more translation by a compiler). If you allow patents on software, you allow patents on ideas. After all, why should an idea written in C be patentable in that case, and one in English or some mathematical notation not? It also renders copyright on software completely useless. What good does it do if you own the copyright on a program if it's also covered by 20 patents you don't own?
It's the same as if there would be patents on plot-elements in books... It's not because you're writing the umpteenth book about a serial killer that you're ripping off all authors that wrote about a serial killer before. If you're downright plagiarising someone, then that other person can already defend himself using the copyright protection he got for free.
The goal of patents is to promote innovation by protecting the investment of entrepreneurs. If you carry over this protection to plain ideas, you are actually discouraging other innovators. After all, innovators are bound to reuse ideas other people have had before when doing something new (using RMS' analogy one more time: just like Beethoven didn't invent music from scratch and yet was very original, there's no programmer who can reinvent informatics from scratch - no matter how good he is).
Additionally, several studies have shown that allowing software patents hampers advances in software development. The reason is that companies start investing part of their R&D budget in obtaining patents instead of innovating more. Of course, they want to recoup that. Since big software companies have more patents than small ones, they can usually force cross-licensing deals with those smaller ones or make them pay. So the end result is that:
- Big companies still get access to all advances in software development, but spend less on innovation themselves (see this study)
- Small companies can do less innovation, because they are forced to buy "patent protection" from large companies. They also have to invest money getting patents of themselves, so that they can negotiate lower licensing fees from big companies. That's all money which cannot be spend on innovating.
The winners are patent bureaus, big companies and patent lawyers. The losers are smaller companies and society as a whole, since less money is spent on innovation.Donate free food here
Lets say someone has a programming problem in a newsgroup. I read it, and out of the the blue i find the solution, i post it as an answer. The hwole world can see his question, the same to my answer. Six months later both him and mee are being sued for patent intrusion, he for implementing it in his program, and i for publishing it for the world. So, if you allow software patents, you can bee sued for something you wrote out of your own head! When talking copyright this isn't possible, if it came from my head, i am the copyright holder. Patents go further, they cover the undelying idea. In a classic patent there is nothing wrong with publishing, it is allredy published. But in the software-case i can be publishing the product, this is the _big_ difference. Software is it's own description, you just have too feed your compiler with the blueprint and the product is made.
Easy to say that patents are necessary to make money. I run a business and spend much of my life making inventions. Patents are out of my reach, not being a lawyer or being able to pay for one full time. Conclusion: the many things I invent and make I cannot patent, yet I am faced with companies who patent things they cannot make.
It is not a fair playing field, and patents are not about protecting hard work, they are about exploiting one's ability to work burocracy in order to get exclusive trading rights.
Your sarcasm is misplaced, some honest and useful dialog would be much better.
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