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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."
People to get software patents and license them ONLY for use in GPL'd software. It would be similar to making copyright into copyleft.
In particular, the Debian non-us site might have to moved to a country that is not in the European Union (so they can continue to distribute multimedia apps that infringe software patents).
The Register said (at http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/4/31472.html) :
It is politicians who make the law, and it is politicians who need to be persuaded if the law is to move in the direction that you desire it to. But while they are a peculiar and varied breed, there are three things you can be fairly certain will not hold much sway with them:
1. Ideological argument. Politicians are nothing if not pragmatic. Their very survival is based on seeing which way the wind is blowing and adjusting accordingly
2. Little-man defence. Politicians will not risk upsetting rich and powerful people and companies unless there is a principle at stake: that principle being that the government ultimately decides. Therefore arguing a point on the basis that it will restrict or impair a powerful body is counterproductive
3. Criticism. Politicians do not respond well to criticism. In fact, the more they get, the more stubborn they become. Flattery is the surest route to their heart, and this means making them feel important. Wining and dining, listening, applauding their insight and then putting your point across
1) That means profits over politics. The Open Source movement should have found some weapon to blackmail politicians into not allowing these new patent law changes to pass. For instance: "If you pass these laws these particular (thousands of) businesses will flee Europe and go elsewhere and take hundreds of thousands of jobs with them."
2) Tyranny of the few is still as true now as it has ever been. Hello, feudalism! Er, welcome back. Er, feudalism never really left!
3) Long live sycophantry!
We need less 'irony'ism and apathy, and more hard core fanaticism in this society.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
1. All computers are Turing-complete. They may be mapped to the natural numbers.
2. From Godel's Theorem, all true theorems in a mathematical system are derivable via an obvious procedure from the axioms of the system.
3. Turing machines are equivalent to the mathematical system describing natural numbers.
4. All computers are therefore mappable to the set of natural numbers, and all processes performable by a particular computer are therefore mapped to a pair of natural numbers.
From the above, all computers, and all programs that terminate, can be mapped to the natural numbers.
A simple enumeration (though it may take some time) would therefore cover all software.
All software is obvious. QED.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
Sounds scary, huh? But consider this: if the government - that means all those politicians hungry for tax dollars - had to weigh on the one hand lengthening copyright terms and, on the other, lengthening the time until they could exploit this new tax revenue base, which way do you think they will vote?
Ironically, the solution may very well begin with encouraging Mexico to adopt this model. At that point you can bet the Hollywood lobbyists will then be calling for a century of protection in the US "so we can keep up" - but if we (the people) then advance and lobby for the other side of this enforcement - that is, making sure the government has an economic incentive in preserving "the public domain" - then we could well begin to take back some of the territory lost to Disney and its ilk.
This story was hit by the biggest crapflood I have ever seen.. Is this what all those trojaned Windoze computers are used for? Trolling on dotslash?
Speaking of patents, one of the most ridiculous software patents I've seen in the US is the interface to the game The Incredible Machine. Nobody can make a game with gizmos used from a gizmo-bar to make things happen.
A solution to the problem with music today
Wow. Thanks for your international interest JBN.
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It would be very helpful if you could send emails or faxes to MEPs. Your non-EU citizenship can be used as a positive, i.e.:
"As an American, I see first hand how software patents hurt innovation and competition in a software industry. Start ups find it hard to enter the market when they can be threatened with costly patent lawsuits and investors are nervous about giving funding to a company when they know that a deeper bank account will likely draw the attention of Intellectual Propertly law firms"
There is a listing of all EU MEPs at:
http://wwwdb.europarl.eu.int/ep5/owa/p_meps2.repa
Good arguments for talking to non-techs can be found at:
(RMS and Nick Hill, longish)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Print/0,3858,4683640,00
(and a short one from me:)
http://www.electronicsweekly.com/issue/inview.asp
If you only speak english, stick with the UK and Ireland. Many EU citizens are already talking with their MEPs, your emails or faxes would be a great reinforcement.
Ciaran O'Riordan
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
Don't fuck with the open source software community. Right now big companies are trying to knock it out using the goverment and the media because they don't like it, and trust me on this one, if they ever managed to make open software illegal, how many white cap hackers do you think would go black overnight and decide permenantly and perpetually destroying the infastructure of companies like microsoft, ibm, sun, etc is the way to show protest?
I don't know about you guys, but protests aren't working, letters aren't working, e-mails aren't working. Voting is not working, propaganda isn't working. There's only 1 alternative after peacful protest; violent protest and our leaders are too dumb to realize that if they piss enough people off, they are dead meat literally.
So label me a terrorist for conveying the message bitch, I'm getting to the end of my rope and patience.
Candy-Coated Knowledge
This would simply use a software licensing term to send a clear message. Want to patent your software? Fine, but you won't get to use it with any open source software.
Everyone is trying to put their damn finger in the dike regarding this stuff. I say we pull our fingers out of the holes and let the place flood. Then we will see how companies like it when they want to use everyone else's work to their financial benefit while not sharing.
You think Amazon and it's "one-click" crap doesn't use open source software to actually implement the idea?