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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?!
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!
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.
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.
r tition?ipid=0&ilg=EN&iorig=home&imsg=
. html ? vpath=/articles/2003/05/28/view02.htm
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!
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.
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?