Slashdot Mirror
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.
It is really a pity that they did not listen more to the companies against software patents, user groups, petitions, and people like Smets-Solanes (who wrote a very interesting paper on the subject). The end result will likely be a smaller number of actors on the market, due to higher information costs, the need of negotiating cross-licensing with other actors and other stupid, unproductive patent related invention-stifling activities. There is no such thing as a law that can not be revoked, though, so keep on fighting.
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).
...only outlaws will have Free software.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Great Newst ml
The vote has been postponed until September 1st.
All info at:
http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/plen0626/index.en.h
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
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
If you don't like this - which you should:P, please sign this petition.
0x or or snor perron?!
If this passes, it could slow or even halt the development of the open source community. SCO and Microsoft could claim an open source OS like SuSE stole something from their OSes. We'd like to make the defendent pay all the court costs and we'd like to sue them for their use of the MS logo. - A prosucutor in a Berlin Court
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!
We have software patents in the US and have had it for many years. I'm not aware of any case where Microsoft or any other big company is trying to shutdown an Open Source project using patent laws. The claim that "with patent law allowed, the floodgates would be opened and Linux distributors swamped and bankrupted by court claims - with Microsoft leading the charge." is baseless.
There's little, however, that can be done (in today's corporatist environment) to prevent the granting of idiotic patents. That pretty much means there's nothing to be done about companies "buying markets" unless (or until) there exists an organization that would have an economic interest in defending against such practices.
No, in theory that could be the creative commons itself - i.e. acting as an IP defense fund in the interest of registrants and using the income from settlements and judgements to fund more actions. The problem there is, of course, that if it actually became successful at this then it's quite easy to see how people would then become critical of the org itself, bitching that it was an organization of judicial elite exploiting "free knowledge" to line it's own pockets. Whether or not there was any validity to thius would, of course, depending on the leadership of the organization. But it is a start, and there does exist a good bit of potential there - both for good, and for abuse.
int j = 0; //EU Software Patent #00000000002
Stay away from my letter.
Sorry if we upset your little picture of the world, but the biggest argument against software patents isn't that we're not allowed to sleep on your couch or to steal your ideas.
If you're clever enough to come up with a new business process (as opposed to manufacturing processes, which patenting was invented for), then you have the right (until your competitors analyse the situation and fight you for market share) to grab as much land as you can.
Patents are intended to protect inventions - as a mathematician, I can prove (beyond all reasonable doubt) that all computer programs follow from all others, therefore all are obvious. Patents are therefore not applicable to software.
oh brave new world, that has such people in it!
It is, dare I say, ironic that Microsoft hasn't engaged in that activity, but there are plenty of other big companies that have and still are trying to shut down open source projects using patent laws. I'm not even going to bother quoting any, there's so many instances.
The claim that "with patent law allowed, the floodgates would be opened and Linux distributors swamped and bankrupted by court claims - with Microsoft leading the charge." is baseless.
You neatly chopped off the start of that quote, "The fear is that with patent law allowed...". They're not claiming anything, they're just giving a likely scenario. The aggressive anti-Linux retoric of the heads of Microsoft and their dubious involvement in the SCO vs Linux nonsense is enough to give weight to that outcome being likely.
We have software patents in the US and have had it for many years.
For most of its history, the US software industry developed in the virtual absence of patents. Widespread use of software patents is largely a phenomenon of the late 1990s.
I'm not aware of any case where Microsoft or any other big company is trying to shutdown an Open Source project using patent laws.
People usually don't even start open source software projects that might infringe software patents. If they do, they usually do so in nations where the patents don't apply, and as a consequence will have a hard time reaching critical mass in the US.
Software patents also have had a chilling effect on commercial development. And they are a drag on research, costing enormous amounts of money to obtain and having little commercial benefit.
As for Microsoft, they didn't use to have a patent portfolio. But, in the spirit of mutually-assured destruction, they have been catching up fast. Expect direct or indirect Microsoft claims against open source projects soon.
This is more a reply to the Register than to Travoltus' post, but did it occur to Kieren McCarthy that blackmailing politicians into action is not the kind of government most people want and that we are trying to exhibit the kind of considered action we want to see more of in our government? I would not consider doing one's homework and presenting a complete case "blackmailing", so perhaps that wasn't the best language for the author to pick.
I have some experience working on political campaigns (two local: one Congressional, one for local city council) and I'm active in my community on a number of other issues, so I'm aware of McCarthy's argument and how to wage it. And it would be valuable to do the research to be able to make that argument. But I think this is one of the weaknesses of the free software and open source movements--we don't mobilize our varied talents well.
Does anyone reading this have the skill needed to address the jobs concern? Or know of anyone who can help? We need help now.
I'm quite familiar with Stallman's excellent speech on the matter of software patents and how it adversely affects free software development. Part of that speech encourages us to consider that patents for one area of endeavor doesn't mean all areas of endeavor should have patents. Has this point been made clear to legislators? Has it been supported with examples of areas where patents would be a big problem (two hypothetical examples off the top of my head: legal argument strategies and surgical techniques--either of which could both lead to people losing their lives due to waiting for the patent holder to choose to represent or operate on them)?
Digital Citizen
As the Register article points out, one of the reasons we're going to lose is that we didn't even try to convince them. We shouted, we hurled abuse, we held huge meetings and didn't invite the other side, but we didn't actually contact them with an explanation of why the proposed change was bad. ("Open letters" don't do shit, no matter how well-written they are.)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
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!
Ciaran O'Riordan, what can Americans do to help?
Digital Citizen
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.
Good news everyone I have if figured out.
... I dunno I figured if I said it twice maybe I could belive it.
Ok my the new patent system works like this, you have to apply for the patent before you actually invent it, if the invention exists at all at the time you first place you patent you are denied (this would include if you already have a product on the market and you are just now patenting it). Second your patent is put in holding where anyone else can see it and if someone else produces a working model within the time frame the patent is void.
If the point of patents is to encourage research as opposed to monopolistic tactics then this will do it.
If the point of patents is to encourage research as opposed to monopolistic tactics then this will do it.
The current SCO/IBM trials should be a stark warning for how well this will work. You will have lost with the first patent you fail to get. Your enemies will be taking your money to pay their lawyers to steal more or your ideas. That is what SCO is doing, now isn't it? It's not like they developed anything, ever. Is this what you want? In the end, you will be no better than your enemies or you will not exist.
Self preservation is not an ideological argument. If the EU does this, large US companies will crush EU software developers, free software will die and all EU governments will end up running M$. These beurcrats need to do a typical M$ install and push that "I submit" button a few times. There's no two ways about it, dipshits like Bezos will flood their system with junk just like they do the US system. This EU deal with the devil will leave the EU burnt.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
yes, they said wining and dining and flattering were the approved methods, which is another way of saying bribing and scmoozing and conning.
It's all tied together, these and so many other apparently illogical actions on the part of many current governments...
There's a solution, but it involves a more... umm... pro active response on the part of millions of people, all acting in concert with each other, across the EU..and the US....
We will have a few superpowers in name, all run by a handful of multinational corporations.
Hey look! A derivative work, probably violates some law! And I don't care!
ya code sixteen hours
and waddaya get
another day older and deeper in debt...
St. Linus doncha call me
cause I can't g-o-o-o-o-o...
I owe my soul to de company sto...
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
Software patents - Obstacles to software development
Richard Stallman
[Transcript of a talk presented 2002-03-25 at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, organized by the Foundation for Information Policy Research. This transcript and audio recording by Nicholas Hill, HTML editing and links by Markus Kuhn.]
You might have been familiar with my work on free software. This speech is not about that. This speech is about a way of misusing laws to make software development a dangerous activity. This is about what happens when patent law gets applied to the field of software.
It is not about patenting software. That is a very bad way, a misleading way to describe it, because it is not a matter of patenting individual programs. If it were, it would make no difference, it would be basically harmless. Instead, it is about patenting ideas. Every patent covers some idea. Software patents are patents that cover software ideas, ideas which you would use in developing software. That is what makes them a dangerous obstacle to all software development.
You may have heard people using a misleading term "Intellectual Property". This term, as you can see, is biased. It makes an assumption that whatever it is you are talking about, the way to treat it is as a kind of property, which is one among many alternatives. This term "Intellectual Property" pre-judges the most basic question in whatever area you are dealing with. This is not conducive to clear and open minded thinking.
There is an additional problem which has nothing to do with promoting any one opinion. It gets in the way of understanding even the facts. The term "intellectual property" is a catch-all. It lumps together completely disparate areas of law such as copyrights and patents, which are completely different. Every detail is different. It also lumps together trademarks which are even more different, and various other things more or less commonly encountered. None of them has anything in common with any of the others. Their origins historically are completely separate. The laws were designed independently. They covered different areas of life and activities. The public policy issues they raise are completely unrelated. So, if you try to think about them by lumping them together, you are guaranteed to come to foolish conclusions. There is literally no sensible intelligent opinion you can have about "Intellectual Property" . If you want to think clearly, don't lump them together. Think about copyrights and then think about patents. Learn about copyright law and separately learn about patent law.
To give you some of the biggest differences between copyrights and patents: Copyrights cover the details of expression of a work. Copyrights don't cover any ideas. Patents only cover ideas and the use of ideas. Copyrights happen automatically. Patents are issued by a patent office in response to an application.
Patents cost a lot of money. They cost even more paying the lawyers to write the application than they cost to actually apply. It takes typically some years for the application to get considered, even though patent offices do an extremely sloppy job of considering.
4:05Copyrights last tremendously long. In some cases they can last as long as 150 years, where patents last 20 years, which is long enough that you can outlive them but still quite long by a timescale of a field such as software.
Think back about 20 years ago when a PC was a new thing. Imagine being constrained to develop software using only the ideas that were known in 1982.
Copyrights cover copying. If you write a novel that turns out to be word-for-word the same with Gone with the Wind and you can prove you never saw Gone with the Wind, that would be a defense to any accusation of copyright infringement.
A patent is an absolute monopoly on using an idea. Even if you could prove you had the idea on your own, it would be entirely irrelevant if the idea is patented by somebody else.
I hope you will forget about
Some people are already working on this, please work with them:
l d=0&commentsort=0&tid=155&tid=99&mode=thread&pid=6 327875#6328000
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&thresho
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
You make a serious point. Newsclips of late have portrayed European governments as highly sympathetic to the needs of their local economies. I doubt the EU can survive the damage to their credibility if they pass this and Munich et al. gives them the bird. Despite zealots, governments in Europe at every level have a huge interest in seeing that Linux thrives. It's a home grown OS for them and an enormous chunk of Europe (15%) depends on Linux. Europeans will get along only if the EU isn't pulling stupid stunts that hurt individual member states. Corporate influence is much weaker because of this dynamic.
Laws are for people with no friends.
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.
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Computers at the very internal level only know if something is on or off. A layer outward shows these patterns can represent numbers. Everything is a number.
People, when they see gui's see text and virtual paperpads ( word processor ), virtual accounting books ( spreadsheets ), text, and cute little graphics. Internally they are just numbers. Most are not even aware of ASCII. Obviously ascii is just a number chart since computers only know numbers and need a way to output and input text. And graphics are just an array of numbers where numerical numbers represent color, darkness, and pixel position for each of the values. All the image formats just compress this to a file but uncompressed the formats are pretty much the same.
The problem is most people writing the laws do not know this and all they hear are lost R&D and jobs due to piracy from industry lobbiests. They consider programing == manufactoring since alot of hard work goes into comming up with idea's and somebody can take them. Also campaign money is a good thing so they can make compromises.
The sad thing is that the EU parliment is not a democracy! They are appointed by memember states. These memember states are elected and influenced by lobbiest. The senators in EU parliment know they can not be unelected so they do not give a shit. I think the EU could be vulnerable to corruption without checks or ballences. Hitler came to power because Germany had a lose set before ww2. He only won 26% of the vote and was appointed by conservative leaders to overthrow the left. Turns out he took over the whole government then country as a result.
http://saveie6.com/
I like the part about inventors being protected. Any poor schmuck can invent an algorithm and sell it to earn a living rather than allowing some rich jerk reverse engineer it and use it in a business.
Software is typically not locked into a jurisdiction. It's production is not confined to a factory. There is no bricks and mortar as long as the software is not used to run a business with a bricks and mortar element.
If the Internet is fast enough, software can be running on a server far away where no patent restriction exists.
The new patent law will cause a spike in inflation. Initially software developers will pay a lot to get as many patents as possible on many little routines. No one wants to leave any crumbs around. If many patents come into existence, there may be a large number of lawsuits going around with people trying to grab as much money as possible. This will cause all kinds of businesses thinking of new software to raise prices.
The inflationary surge should start soon, even before the vote. Programmers that anticipate a patent deadlock, the situation where patent holders sue each other for every little software tidbit, have to raise capital now to patent as much as possible. Research has to be done to prepare for patent applications. No one wants to miss the boat.
What has to be prepared? I'm not an expert in patent law, but the software developer has to show that the software does something not done before in existing patents, at the very least. This will mean searching the patents as well as explaining what the software does so nicely. Time consuming and expensive but the loser pays the winner so it's worth it.
One can bet that all the large companies that get in the race will try to patent everything and the kitchen sink so a lot of software may be unpatentable due to competing claims received at the same time for the same thing.
All the same, no one wants to find out that quicksort has been patented by IJKIJK Inc. all because no one else competed for it.
A ton of money was spent on Y2K. Now a frenzy of spending will occur for patents.
Let's compile lists of software, patented and yet-to-be-patented.
Know your pads. One time pad: good for cryptography. Two timing pad: where to take your mistress.
How will these patent laws effect governments which are trying to use open source? They might have more pull than anyone.
Hello Cruel World
One reason this has come up as an issue, is because the US (via the WTO) have been applying pressure to countries around the world to "reform" their IP systems -- to match the US' own system -- for quite a while.
The TRIPS (Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights) treaty, and GATT, are the main methods used to do this. The FFII page on the treaty notes 'Article 27 has often been construed by patent lawyers to imply that patent claims must be allowed to extend to computer programs' (my emphasis).
FFII go on to make the case that this can be circumvented BTW; here's hoping, since all of Europe has signed up to TRIPS AFAIK.
No. You are free to use whatever you develop. That will never change. What you will not be able to do is to sell your product and make money with it.
Look, there are a couple of problems with this database:
(0) They require CVS. That's awkward. Lots of people have ideas who don't use CVS.
(1) It's website is, by the URL, non-GNU. My worst nightmare would be submitting to this site, and later finding that they patented it. Microsoft would love to buy a site like this. How do I know this won't happen? They don't describe their process; they just say "oh, it's here." That bothers me. Can the FSF verify this site?
(2) the PADB should be sending its ideas to the appropriate developers for possible development. Specifically, coders should be able to sign up for the class of coding they they do, and submitters should be able to direct information to them. But there's a name for this: a journal. At the very least, all ideas in the DB should *also* be published on the web. I should be able to go to a website, and either browse or search.
---Now, what I think the PADB should be doing instead:---
(3) Time-stamping is easy: simply submit a copy of your information to the Library of Congress (US) or any other national library.
(4) Both (2) and (3) can probably be accomplished by publishing a journal would do the trick. Typically, as people subscribe to journals, they also pay a small amount -- or advertisers pay.
(5) As available, the PADB should also research true prior art, to break patents that are strangling free software. Those should be published as well, with a reference.
(6) I have no idea whether this site will do this or not, but the site should keep a database of the inventors. Probably the inventors have more ideas, or have done more work than is published. Therefore, they are an ideal consultant.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
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.
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?
A pondering/suggestion:
I think it is time to put our money where our mouths are, since it seems that at the present hour, this is the only way to be heard. The saying "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure," seems to be apropos right now. I mean, there have got to be a least a million users of Linux that are aware of the issues at hand, earn their living in large part due to OSS and GPL'd software, either through coding or adminstering it, and/or both combined. I'd wager that at least a million or so of us could donate 100 U.S. dollars each to some general fund to promote the interests of OSS and GPL. I think it's time we all realized that our asses are on the line and if we don't put up a good fight now it's game over. How much is your freedom worth to you? How much is your time worth to you, and then consider the countless hours you will waste using proprietary once you no longer have a choice - not to mention the things you will never be able to do should you be forced to use only proprietary software. You can accuse me of being an alarmist, but it seems to me that this is the intention of the BSA et. al. These are ruthless, amoral people that aren't happy until they have total control, people who consider sharing a trait of "suckers".
Everyone on this site seems to want to bash RMS, but excuse me, where is Linus while this EU putsch is going down? I mean, if for no other reason, he should be a little concerned about his own rearend, because if things keep going the way they are, he'll be next in line for a lawsuit. You may not agree with everything RMS says, but at least he's out there doing battle. It's 5 til' midnight, doesn't Linus have anything to say about this. WTF! If not Linus, somebody in a leadership position needs to standup and ring the donation bell real loud and clear and lead the charge because We are losing the battle.
BEEP! Wrong. MEPs ( Members of the European Pariliment) are elected. I think that the election is every 4 or 5 years.
These memember states are elected and influenced by lobbiest. The senators in EU parliment know they can not be unelected so they do not give a shit.
BEEP! Wrong again. What you are thinking of is the European Commission - similar to the US Administration who are also unelected.
There are several check's and balances in the EU including EU Parliment, EU Commission, EU Court of Justice, National Parliments, EU Court of Auditors, EU Court of Human Rights, and EU Council of Ministers.
I think the EU could be vulnerable to corruption without checks or ballences.
You are quite naive if you think that any political process is immune to corruption.
Hitler came to power because Germany had a lose set before ww2. He only won 26% of the vote and was appointed by conservative leaders to overthrow the left.
Oh gawd! I won't even try to correct this many mistakes/miscomprehensions/rose-spectactled view of the world.
The truth is, we have about three weeks to go, because for most of the summer the MEPs are away on holiday.
To be more precise:
- Next week [30/06 - 04/07] we can lobby in Strasbourg (Session).
- The week after [07/07 - 11/07] we can lobby in Brussels (Committee meetings).
... after that there is no official business scheduled all summer ...- Finally [25-29/08] there is one week in Brussels before the September session which starts on 1st September.
Even then, attendence for the two outlying committee meeting session-weeks in Brussels is notoriously poor.The MEPs' UK constituency offices stay open over the summer, but politics in Brussels essentially shuts down.
Most of the political groups will decide in Strasbourg this week what line they will take, before all the MEPs go away.
Predictions of the demise of computing, or even the demise of European computing, seem a little premature, IMO. Whenever this sort of thing is discussed on /., people respond as if we are talking about the law of the Medes and the Persians, ie once it's passed it can't be modified or recinded. A brief look at EU legislation in any other area shows that this is not the case.
Take farming legislation. At one point, the EU was paying farmers to remove hedges from between fields to allow US-scale farming technology. Lots of people said it was a dumb idea, the EU persisted, the topsoil blew away, and now the EU is paying farmers to put the hedges back. Probably not the best environmental scenario imaginable, but it could have been a lot worse.
On the 35-hour week, one of the cornerstones of EU employment law, countries like the UK never bothered to enforce it, and countries like France who did are now backpeddling like mad before unemployment rises any further.
The EU is not the Beast, it's just not clever enough. It doesn't have much of an ideology, despite France's best efforts to give it one. It's the world's biggest fudge factory. The people who draft the legislation like regulation, but if it hurts national interests those people get stomped on.
IF software patents are approved, and IF they are enforced at national level (in Italy?? Greece???), and IF large companies set out to destroy small companies, the legislation will be changed. The first time a non-French company threatens French jobs through patents enforcement, I would expect the French government to take unilateral action, backed by the majority of their population and the Germans, and simply refuse to budge until the EU caves in, much as they did over BSE (the UK had the law squarely on their side, but what difference did it make?) I saw an article in a national French newspaper six months ago about a powerful French lobby demanding that French computer games be classified as 'art', like films, so that the government can limit and tax US imports, subsidise French computer games, enforce quotas in shops and cybercafes...
So if you guys the other side of the Pond want to see this law withdrawn, lobby a big American company to threaten a French one, and Chirac will do the rest :-)
The same is true for patents in the US, except that the rebound would be faster and harder. Politicians are stupid, but they aren't that stupid.
Virtually serving coffee
I saw him at a conference in 2000 on "Collaboration and Ownership in the Digital Environment" - a big multidisciplinary thing on IP. He was as you say, a prepared, coherent and persuasive speaker.
Then the next speaker came on, an EU patent lawyer, to describe the current system. He pointed out that you can already patent software in the EU, you just have to use the right phrasing. Somewhere in the middle of this, RMS went bersek and started ranting from the audience. People had to persuade him to leave before the lawyer could continue.
If that had been, say, an internal EU consultation on patents, someone would have called security and that would have been the end of the Free Software community's involvement in the process.
RMS is not always a zealot, but flashes of zealotry are just too inappropriate for the modern political environment. A different representative is needed for that, and one has not yet appeared.
In Europe, both at EU level and in many countries within it, it's quite normal for governments to come down heavily in favour of a particular piece of legislation to begin with, but then to back off rapidly if faced with a backlash of popular opinion. The fact that this has been brought up now doesn't mean it will automatically get passed as it stands.
As for what the US or its big corps want, you're obviously not very familiar with Europe. With the notable exception of Tony Blair supporting Bush's invasion of Iraq (and in that case, look how the rest of Europe acted), Europeans aren't exactly known for towing the US party line. Our legal systems and governing bodies don't seem to be nearly as susceptible to corporate influence and bribes as the US equivalents.
Personally, here in the UK, I put this down to having more than two political parties with significant power, and bizarrely enough to having the House of Lords (our unelected second chamber, whose members normally stay for life, which the government is currently trying to do away with) as a check and balance on the whims of any incumbent majority party. But I digress...
Getting back to the plot, it does matter what the people think here, and if enough people make reasoned, informed objections, the politicians' opinions are likely to change. The problem, as the linked article in el Reg so insightfully noted, is that the average person complaining about this gets up on his holier-than-thou high horse and starts ranting. That will have exactly the opposite effect to what the advocates want, and let's face it, it probably deserves to.
By the way, MEP = Member of the European Parliament, who are elected representatives from European member states. How much real power they have is debatable, because there are other bodies involved at Europe level besides the EP, but certainly they have a significant influence on European policy.
MP = Member of Parliament, an elected representative of a national government (in the UK, and possibly elsewhere, though I don't know of any other country that uses that specific term). These guys do have real power. However, under current international agreements, certain "guidance" from Europe is pretty much required to be incorporated into national law in its member states within a defined timescale after it is passed at Europe level.
Thus MPs must pass laws that respect the European direction, and under some circumstances cases within the UK can wind up being taken to Europe if the UK law is inadequate in this regard. Human rights issues have seen several such cases since Europe passed much stronger HR rules than the UK used to have not so long ago.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
The problem with RMS is that he's a wildcard.
He is capable, as you say, of putting together a very coherent argument to support his beliefs, and of presenting it very professionally. This is good.
However, he is also capable of launching into spontaneous rants that are totally one-sided. He will completely ignore the good points of things he disagrees with, while outright exaggerating the damage done by something, or the negative effects he thinks it will have. His extreme views as expressed in these rants are often incompatible with any realistic outcome. Such rants very much do more harm than good, yet he has indulged in them on numerous occasions, both in print and with a live audience.
Someone so unpredictable is simply not a good figurehead for a political movement hoping to see something changed. The first rant would convince the politicians that he was an extremist whose views were unrealistic and whose goals were unattainable, and thus someone who contributes nothing useful to a constructive debate.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
That's my post and my signature. You think you're clever, right? I wonder how many other posts you've stolen.
Laws are for people with no friends.