Slashdot Mirror
Software Patent Demonstrations Taking Off
feklee writes "The preparations for the
rally against software patents
on Wednesday are running at full speed. Thanks to announcements in DWN, on KDE, in the Register, and
elsewhere, the Online Demo has already
more than 600 participants such as Savannah
and KDE.de. Now, what about your project?"
And flagboy writes "A group of economists from Europe and the U.S. specialising in patent questions have published a letter to members of the European Parliament calling on them to reject the proposal, accompanied by an analytical paper which casts severe doubts on the reasoning behind the directive and on the methods employed by its proponents." Here's the FFII Press Release.
How many cases of patent cases has there really been throughout the years?
Have you heard about the SCO debacle? IBM is suing SCO over patents right now.
If you read the halloween documents, it becomes clear that Microsoft thinks that patents are one of the best ways to stop the Linux spread. When they interviewed users, they thought that IP issues over Linux was something that held them back from Linux adoption.
)9TSS
If you are an European and able to visit Brussels tomorrow, please do so! It doesn't occur much that we Europeans have a good opportunity to get ourselfs heard on these topics.
See here for info. You can visit Brussels by train from many a European country; see here
Hope this all isn't slashdotted before I will plan my own trip this afternoon.
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
Now, if there's any big spender listening: It's time for action now!
I have contacts at the EPO. Here is how it works:
1. The EPO is self-financed. They do not receive any money from the EU states.
2. The EPO makes money from patent royalties.
3. The EPO does not have much money.
4. The EPO is ready to accept anything to make money as long as nobody complains.
5. Profit!
The way it works at the EPO is the following: Someone submits something to get a patent.
If it is not completely stupid, a provisional patent is awarded, even if obvious prior art exists!!!
If there has been no negative comments after one year, the patent is awarded.
So I am certain the EU will give the EPO the right to award software patents. The only way to stop this is by periodically checking what provisional patents are awarded and bombard the EPO with negative comments and prior arts.
my 0.02 Euro
Suppose you labor extremely hard to create something, it took so much of your time, might have cost you a marriage, every single penny in your account, and someone comes and swipes it from under your feet what would you do?
Getting a bit emotional, are we? Try to stay with the facts instead of conjuring up heartbreak stories. (Alternatively pursue a career as Hollywood script writer)
Having some country throw patent ideas out is rather lame, and in the long run is only going to hurt those who innovate more than anyone else.
Uh-huh. That't why researchers from MIT and the Federal Reserve Bank in an empirical study concludes that "greater use of software patents is associated with lower R&D intensity. [...] we can reject the argument that software patents have on average increased R&D incentives." Now how does that happen if limiting patentability "hurts innovators more than anyone else"?
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
Patents by their very nature always offensive, they prevent others from independently working even if they never harm you or your market in any way and you don't sue them.
Not so - the patent holder has to sue for violation of the patent. They can choose not to, and don't even risk losing the patent if they don't (as I understand it, I ANAL, etc).
If you want a defense then publish, don't patent
Let's say there are two companies, A and B, working in the same field. A patents everything, B publishes everything. Everything is fine, until one day B (perhaps unwittingly) violates one of A's patents. A makes demands that they pay a licence fee or stop. Now B has no choice but to comply - they cannot reply to A by saying "Ah, but *you* are violating *this* patent of ours, so let's call it quits, shall we?".
Publishing your work only protects you from others patenting it, it doesn't protect from violating another's patents, and that's the problem. As long as one company in a given field registers patents, they all must.
It's official. Most of you are morons.
The patent may have expired in the US, but unfortunately it is still in force in Canada, France, Italy, Germany, the United Kingdom and Japan.
But of course there are plenty of technical reasons for switching to PNG as well.
Burn all GIFs!
Blog Ho
Warning: sql kitten is a known troll.
Anyway. He didn't just make it up. Some of the most famous capitalists in 20th century history, have pointed out that ALL patents are anti-capitalist and came out swinging against them.
Also, the open source community does innovate. You're cherry picking non-innovative projects. EROS is extremely innovative. CMUCL and later ML were extremely innovative type-inferencing compilers. Reiserfs is trying to innovate filesystem semantics, finally hoping to provide relational structure ACID capabilities and what not, like a dynamically-typed database.
Basically, nearly all REAL CompSci innovation comes from research projects which are usually open source, in the true spirit of science and academia. It may take decades for such things to filter through to the drone-programmers in corporations.
A patent is a device to prevent the diffusion of new methods before
the original investor has recovered profit adequate to induce the
requisite investment. The justification of the patent system is that
by slowing down the diffusion of technical progress it ensures that
there will be more progress to diffuse. The patent system introduces
some of the greatest complexities in the capitalist rules of the game
and leads to many anomalies. Since it is rooted in a contradiction,
there can be no such thing as an ideally beneficial patent system, and
it is bound to produce negative results in particular instances,
impeding progress unnecessarily, even if its general effect is
favourable on balance.
-- J. Robinson,
The Accumulation of Capital, 1956.
petition.eurolinux.org
Isn't that what copyright is for? No patents necessary.
I wrote to my MEP and explained to him how serious
matter this is and gave him a couple of practical
and easy to understand examples of the bad things
that might follow, if software patents are OK'd.
If you are a citizen of an EU member country,
I suggest you do the same.
Is not the patent system meant to benefit people like me, who thought up something before it was possible to do
NO IT IS NOT!!!!
Otherwise Arthur C Clarke could've charged a NASA a trillion dollars for the priviledge of launching his invention, the communication satellite.
People like you should not benefit from the patent system. You thought up something that was impossible at the time... meaning it was "useless"... flying in the face of the "progress of science and useful arts" clause of the US Constituion.
Was your idea a real breakthrough? I don't know, but I doubt it. Were you some amazing genius, who discovered something nobody else would have? Unlikely. Chances are that as technology progressed to the point where it was possible to accomplish these things, many many other smart people would have had the same ideas you did.
In fact, it's fairly likely that several people though of your "invention" before you did, too. They just didn't have the legal "foresight" to seek government monopoly on an idea with no practical application.
against a company that came up with this idea about three years after I had developed it to
There, you acknowledge the patent system should not be defending you. By stating that they "came up with this idea", you admit they independently rediscovered your great invention- suggesting it wasn't all that special to begin with.
until it is reduced to a working invention. This is a requirement of getting a patent.
Nope, it once was a requirement, but no longer. You can patent things without a working model or even a schematic. A "Description of Preferred Embodiment" is needed, but can be quite vague, if a sharp lawyer writes it up.
So, you are saying that myself, an very small-time inventor, should have no right to protect myself against someone with more money that comes up with the same idea long after myself?
If by "protect yourself" you mean "extract money from a more successful competitor", then no, you should have no right.
Patents should only serve to promote progress "of science or useful arts". Allowing you to exact a tax on all DVD players does not promote progress. You haven't demonstrated any way that your invention accelerated the arrival of an entertaining consumer product. Having read 6142913, it looks quite worthy of inclusion in the ever-growing list of spurious patents for obvious ideas.
The fact that patent law does not allow indepentent rediscovery as an absolute defense is one of its greatest failings.