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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."
Those lobbying in favour of software patents wanted to have the final vote next week. But it has now been decided (sorry, link in German) that it will be held in September, as planned originally.
The patents might not have so much effect in Europe, as patents take 7-10 years to be granted, and there is a 9 month period in which objections to the patent can be voiced before a patent is granted.
In Soviet Russia, beowulf clusters imagine YOU!
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?
I e-mailed my MEP and was most supprised to get a reply at all, unfortunatly it wasn't anything good.
:o( I wonder how much he got paid to say that?
He said that after cairful consideration and consultation with industry they were a necessary step to allow the EU to remain competative
Engineers are supposed to be ethical as well as commercially minded, and consider the social consequences of their actions - something he seems to have forgotten when he became a politician.
Beep beep.
This probably the easiest way to be active on these kind of matters if you are joe/jill the average user.
Join the Electronic Frontier organizations:
Electronic Frontier Foundation - USA
Electronic Frontier Finland
Electronic Frontier Canada
Electronic Frontiers Australia
Electronic Frontier Ireland
Electronic Frontier Sverige
Electronisk Forpost Norge
Electronic Frontier Ireland
Electronic Frontiers Italy
(use them as google search terms)
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.
Fnord.sig
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"
The article is from the 26th of June and states that the proposal is due for parliamentary vote on June 30th (earlier than originally planned).
However, the vote has been postponed and is not going to take place on June 30th, at least according to more recent reports by the usually well-informed German heise.de news service.
heise.de news article (in German)
This seems to contradict the article at least in spirit and gives the Open Source/Free Software community more time to gain momentum and turn the vote into the right direction.
EuroLinux already has more than 150.000 signatures against software patents
A NG =en
http://petition.eurolinux.org/signatures.html?L
And in an open discussion 90% of the people affected opted for no software patents. The European commission closed the discussion with the words, that there was a financial majority (of 10%). So you basically can see where the train comes from. The last hope to stop this really is the european parlament.
Canßt find the link to this now, this discussion was around two years ago, and I want to leave anybody to the interpretation himself.
All I can say is with one of the former commissions there was a huge bribe scandal, the main problem is that there is no real control mechanism for the commission and sometimes some really black sheep are in there.
Also something to consider
Given the state of the european software industry consisting 95% of individuals and small companies, the negative economic impact of such a regulation really could be severe. The the European Commission is playing the three monkey games of not listening not hearing and not talking in this matter. In the end the result will have to be paid by every european citizen with a lot more people being unemployed by the tech sector.
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.
REDMOND, WA--In what CEO Bill Gates called "an unfortunate but necessary step to protect our intellectual property from theft and exploitation by competitors," the Microsoft Corporation patented the numbers one and zero Monday.
With the patent, Microsoft's rivals are prohibited from manufacturing or selling products containing zeroes and ones--the mathematical building blocks of all computer languages and programs--unless a royalty fee of 10 cents per digit used is paid to the software giant.
"Microsoft has been using the binary system of ones and zeroes ever since its inception in 1975," Gates told reporters. "For years, in the interest of the overall health of the computer industry, we permitted the free and unfettered use of our proprietary numeric systems. However, changing marketplace conditions and the increasingly predatory practices of certain competitors now leave us with no choice but to seek compensation for the use of our numerals."
A number of major Silicon Valley players, including Apple Computer, Netscape and Sun Microsystems, said they will challenge the Microsoft patent as monopolistic and anti-competitive, claiming that the 10-cent-per-digit licensing fee would bankrupt them instantly.
"While, technically, Java is a complex system of algorithms used to create a platform-independent programming environment, it is, at its core, just a string of trillions of ones and zeroes," said Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy, whose company created the Java programming environment used in many Internet applications. "The licensing fees we'd have to pay Microsoft every day would be approximately 327,000 times the total net worth of this company."
"If this patent holds up in federal court, Apple will have no choice but to convert to analog," said Apple interim CEO Steve Jobs, "and I have serious doubts whether this company would be able to remain competitive selling pedal-operated computers running software off vinyl LPs."
As a result of the Microsoft patent, many other companies have begun radically revising their product lines: Database manufacturer Oracle has embarked on a crash program to develop "an abacus for the next millennium." Novell, whose communications and networking systems are also subject to Microsoft licensing fees, is working with top animal trainers on a chimpanzee-based message-transmission system. Hewlett-Packard is developing a revolutionary new steam-powered printer.
Despite the swarm of protest, Gates is standing his ground, maintaining that ones and zeroes are the undisputed property of Microsoft.
"We will vigorously enforce our patents of these numbers, as they are legally ours," Gates said. "Among Microsoft's vast historical archives are Sanskrit cuneiform tablets from 1800 B.C. clearly showing ones and a symbol known as 'sunya,' or nothing. We also own: papyrus scrolls written by Pythagoras himself in which he explains the idea of singular notation, or 'one'; early tracts by Mohammed ibn Musa al Kwarizimi explaining the concept of al-sifr, or 'the cipher'; original mathematical manuscripts by Heisenberg, Einstein and Planck; and a signed first-edition copy of Jean-Paul Sartre's Being And Nothingness. Should the need arise, Microsoft will have no difficulty proving to the Justice Department or anyone else that we own the rights to these numbers."
Added Gates: "My salary also has lots of zeroes. I'm the richest man in the world."
According to experts, the full ramifications of Microsoft's patenting of one and zero have yet to be realized.
"Because all integers and natural numbers derive from one and zero, Microsoft may, by extension, lay claim to ownership of all mathematics and logic systems, including Euclidean geometry, pulleys and levers, gravity, and the basic Newtonian principles of motion, as well as the concepts of existence and nonexistence," Yale University theoretical mathematics professor J. Edmund Lattimore said. "In other words, pretty much everything."
Lattimore said that the only mat
I saw this yesterday; I emailed two of the MEPs in my constituency whose parties I was aware were in support of software patents (I would have liked to write, but with a 30 June deadline the letter wouldn't have time to get there). I also emailed Pat Cox, President of the European Parliament and another Irish MEP. Within six minutes, I had a response from his assistant.
:) I don't fully understand it, but have replied asking for clarification. So far, I'm pleased that he has (a) taken a position and (b) taken one that regards the issue with some care. I also thanked his assistant for correcting me about the vote on 30 June.
The gist of it is this: the European Parliament report will be taken during the session 1-4 September. The European Liberal Group (european meta-party of which Mr. Cox is a member) hasn't taken a definitive position on the report yet, but as it has been going through the committee system they have taken a very restrictive position regarding what can be patented.
I won't copy-paste the euro-speak here.
This means there's plenty of time. Write to your MEP explaining, politely, how you think software patents would harm our industry in your country and in Europe as a whole, and perhaps explaining the problems inappropriate use software patents have caused elsewhere. The idea of patents is to encourage innovation - explain why software patents don't do this.
No response from the other two yet; I'll be writing to them and following up by phone.
Dave
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.
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!
You can defy gravity... for a short time
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.
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
Open Forum Europe got stitched up.
The patent directive is far from a done deal, as the success of last week's lobbying in Brussels shows.
The important point, that the journalist didn't realise, was that Mike Banahan was not talking about a consultation run by the European Commission or the European Parliament, but about a *consultation run by a firm of lobbyists* who had been hired by a consortium of big business associations. (Remember that OFE's response was paraded not by the Commission, but by this consortium of associations).
So the real story is
The subsequent paragraphs take on a completely different dimension when you realise they are about the lobbying firm for the business associations, not the European institutions:
The quotes are echoed in this posting to the FSF Europe-UK list:
The parliament vote is now expected in the first week of September. The Socialist group in particular is very divided. But internal party-group positions are expected to take shape this week, while the MEPs are all gathered together in Strasbourg, before they disperse for the long summer recess. It is therefore worth contacting MEPs now, sooner rather than later, to have maximum effect.
Contact details for UK MEPs can be found by clicking on the map here
(This information sent to ZDnet on Thursday night, but apparently not of interest).
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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