EU Parliament to Vote on New Patent Rules

peter_sd writes "The Register has an article discussing the implications to the open source community and small software businesses of the new software patent law to be voted on tomorrow by the EU parliament. According to the article, it is very likely the new patent law will be accepted despite its grave consequences."

Comments

Vote postponed, time to get organised

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Great News
The vote has been postponed until September 1st.
All info at:
http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/plen0626/index.en.ht ml

This means we must have their attention.

Please contact your national FreeSoftware or digital-freedom group to organise an Adopt-an-MEP campaign. If the vote did take place tomorrow, we would lose but with the help of a few concerned citizens, we will win.

Ciaran O'Riordan

Petition

[zmooc]

If you don't like this - which you should:P, please sign this petition.

It exists: Prior Art DataBase

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Some people are already working on this, please work with them:

http://www.nongnu.org/padb/

Development of the database is being worked on at:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/padb/
and the software used is Free Software, available at:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/topas/

Lobbying EU MEPs is still the best thing we can do right now, people from any country can do this. I gave an example for what an American can do in a later post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=69331&threshol d=0&commentsort=0&tid=155&tid=99&mode=thread&pid=6 327875#6328000

Ciaran O'Riordan

Re:It exists: Prior Art DataBase

[kramer2718]

Well, I have taken (some of) your advice. I have written a letter to most of the EU representatives from the UK. I enclose the text so that other slashdotters can use it in contacting any EU reps. I may not be the best rhetorician, and I certainly glossed over many technical details, but feel free to use/modify the following:

I am writing this because the European Union is considering a alteration of patent law to bring it in line with U.S. patent law particularly with respect to software patents. I am an american, and I understand that my government is placing great pressure on the European Union to change their patent policy. However, I can tell you that the patent policy here is extremely bad. In particular, software patents are a problem for several reasons. First, allowing software patents will encourage a glut of ridiculous patent applications. Second, in the software industry collaboration is a more effective strategy than protection. Third, the admittance of software patents would encumber the developement and innovation process with too many legal considerations.

As a computer programmer, I keep track of significant developements in the software industry, and there have been some very silly patents awarded lately. One aspect of programming is that software tends to build on other software. As such when a new technology such as the internet becomes available, many applications that may seem non-obvious to a lay person are fairly obvious to a skilled programmer. It's then only a matter of who gets to the patent office first. One example of this is the Amazon.com one-click-purchase patent. It is quite evident how to do this. It's also a fairly obvious idea. Yet the patent led to a lawsuit which took years to settle. Ask yourself this, "Would I like to see European Union courts burdened by such frivoities?" I hope the answer is "No".

Collaboration is especially in the software industry. In particular, the success of Open Source Software (or OSS) shows how successful cooperation can be. If you are not familiar with OSS, it is a software developement model in which the client can see the internal workings of a program and freely copy them. Often, OSS programs are distributed free of charge, also. Often, many people (sometimes as many as one million; mostly amateurs) will contribute to an OSS project. Some OSS projects have accomplished things that giant corporations never could. For instance, Linux and BSD are some of the best most stable operating systems around. Many companies such as IBM and Hewlett Packard use OSS as a starting point and build solutions for clients on top of it.

OSS has many advantages but is particularly vulnerable to software patents. Because the source code (internal representation) of the programs are available, patent owners can pick through the program to find an infringements where closed source programs do not have that problem. Also, because OSS projects are often undertaken by collectives of hobbyists and altruistic amateurs, if there is an accusation of patent infringement, there are not usually funds to fight in court. In this way, a corporation could stop an OSS competitor by just filing suit. If this ever became common practice, it would be the end of Open Source Software and the technolgical world (not just the computer industry) would suffer immensely.

The process of software developement does not need to be encumbered with the patent process. Software evolves rapidly and if developers have to do a patent search every time they write a program, software developement would grind to a halt. (You may think it unlikely that a programmer could accidentally write a patented program, but I assure it is not; note the above Amazon.com case, several auction patents, various interface patent; there are many more).

In closing I implore you to vote against software patents or at least to restrict the term. Drug companies may need 20 years to recoup developement costs, but the software industry moves much faster than that. Often a granted patent is many years obsolete by the time it expires.

Re:Good for them

[infolib]

intellectual property and patents are two fundamentally different things.

No. "Intellectual property" is used generally about exclusive rights to information in some form. See for instance the annex to the EU directive proposal on IP enforcement. It mentions copyright, trademarks, biopatents, denominations of geographical origin, semiconductor topography etc. Oh well, perhaps it's used differently in the US.

Vote was postponed to September

[Balaitous]

It is known since Thursday 26 June that the vote will not occur on 30 June. Despite pressure from the pro-patent UK labour rapporteur Arlene McCarthy, the conference of group presidents in the Parliament has decided that the vote in plenary will occur only in September.
A little more time to convince Members of the European Parliament of all parties of the the common sense decision: rejecting patents for software ideas and information processing methods.