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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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
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 had a chance to hear some of the American side of the story from Radia Perlman and from what little I've read it seems the RSA patent here in the US hindered adopting standards which used it - something that didn't happen in Europe. Wouldn't this real world situation make for a good argument against software patents?
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
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?