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 cases of DMCA prosecution have their been? Hardly any, but that doesn't make it any more just.
Unjust legislation must be fought. It is insufficient to simply hope it wont be enforced, like some sort of naive child.
Just one question:
What will I see on slashdot.org tomorow???
Or is slashdot going to mention a great idea and ignore it the day after?
Jeroen
Secure messaging: http://quickmsg.vreeken.net/
You obviously don't talk out your ass enough. It almost always gets an insightful. :P
What people are objecting to is that innovation is being stifled by large corporations; I'm not going to mention any names, because it doesn't really matter who the company of the moment is. It's been like that for a long time, the names change but the principle is the same. The market should have more choice, but patents, buyouts, and monopolistic practices are actually supported by the current (and previous) legislatory systems are just getting more and more power. Like the hippy movement in the seventies against government powers and personal liberties beginning really to make moves against the "establishment", the yuppie move in the eighties towards personal financial freedom against the common good, the nineties technological gadget and consumerism move... and now in the 21st century people are beginning to look at inflation, unemployment and their lack of free time and starting to think maybe there is a better way. But still the rich are fighting to keep everything they have, and middle class people are following the consumer trend like sheep, they're cooling their houses with aircon, running their cars, throwing away more and more tons of garbage every year, getting fatter, and generally using more resources than they really need.
Let us not forget that Free (as in speech) is what we are still fighting for. The medium changes, the spirit stays the same. We should not let corporate greed and a system where each year more profits need to be made become the pillar of our society, but it's been happening for years and years. Globalisation just makes this more blatent, more all encompassing, and more to the detriment of the world's poor.
The rich are still getting richer, the poor are still getting poorer, and however many examples you give me of "land of the free" and personal gain still being possible no matter who you are, the overwhelming trend is that the masses are still being screwed, and there really are people who are born into dead end lives, and it's not getting any better.
And still, many people will respond to my post and say I'm a socialist and the system won't really abide by that, because capitalism is here to stay and it's the only fair system. I'm not really saying that. Just ask yourself one question : are you recycling all that you can, giving a few extra minutes a day to help the looming natural resource problem? Are you using less water, using cooler washing cycles, hanging out your laundry instead of drying with electricity, keeping cool in the shade with iced tea instead of turning up the aircon a notch, eating just enough to keep your hunger at bay and giving a dollar to the bum on the street from time to time?
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
As an additional (or alternative) action, people are encouraged to participate in an online demonstration that day, replacing the main page of their website with a text explaining the dangers of introducing unlimited patentability in Europe
Whoever wrote this should think twice before they word something. I took this as a call to hackers to replace their (meaning the people they're protesting against) webpage.
Oh well now onto my oh so eloquent commentary which is worth nothing... Why would anyone want to do something as moronic as protest the patent laws? 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? Without patenting there wouldn't be much you could do now could you.
Look laws are sometimes unfair, in fact take a look at some historical quotes:
"Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but lets wasps and hornets break through" Swift 'A treatise essay upon the faculties of the mind'
"Wherever law ends tyranny begins." Locke 'Civil Government'
No one ever said the laws were perfect but trying to remove them is plain dangerous. Maybe tweaking them for kinks is a better idea, and in certain cases a judge should have the discretion to make decisions based on experience and ethics, instead of allowing miscarriages of justice to happen.
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.
As for this:
Doesn't make much sense. A body of people asking to close their websites to protest. As if people should lose money over something that sounds rather interesting on the outside, but in-depth makes no sense? I would rather pass on it. What will be protested after? Bandwidth usage that connects to the site which offended someone. Sure let's block Amazon's whole CIDR why not.MoFscker
I consider "stealing" "intellectual property" a bad thing. As in: with this trivial software patent, company X stole an idea that could have been everyone's. You opposing this could be a small or medium sized company, a non-profit, an individual that demands respect of "IP", anyone... This is not something that can be placed solely on the right or the left of the political spectrum. Agreeing to patenting these trivialities can only come from two things: ignorance and opportunism. The difference between these two is that at a certain decision-making level (think member of European parliament), ignorance becomes opportunism. Because it's the decision maker's to carefully examine the decision (s)he makes.
It makez sense that europeans would be more 'aware of the world' than americans. The US was long protected by relative geographic isolation in a way that no one in europe has been. (Canada and Mexico haven't been any serious threat in 100 years). While this distance isn't nearly as protective as it used to be, the effect on the american psyche is still there.
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
Er ... so you don't mind your company beying sued by someone because you clean-room-implemented something they did 30 years ago and now use only to sue everyone left and right? You don't mind spending money on lawyers? You don't mind paying UniSys money for your program that generates gifs which is known format since 19xy? Where have you been, man?
Actually, Internet security is a point against software patents. What users of networked systems need more than ever are services helping them to secure their infrastructure against all kinds of threads, making boxed software packages less important both technically and economically. Just like an airline needs continuous maintenance of their fleet, a company running computers needs continuous maintenance of their systems.
http://erichsieht.wordpress.com/category/english/
Tomorrow (27 August 2003) there is a demonstration in front of the impressive EU parliament.
v alues=TYPE%25.Manifestation,SITE!.40
All the peolple who care & can come, please come so that there is a small chance we might impress some MP's...
I'll be there, will you ?
http://pax.protest.net/event.cgi?ID=415100&state_
The European Patent Office has already granted ~30.000 patents on software, logic and the like, totally ignoring current law.
The majority of those software patents are trivial and overbroad. There are patents on tabs, progress bars and archiving emails.
Developing software will become an uncalculateable risk for smaller and even medium sized companies.
How far do you think computer sciences would have progressed if there existed patents on things like parametrisation of functions or on stacks?
I'm rehearsing this for when I jump into the camera's tomorrow :-)
3 issues:
1. General patentability issue
Do patents protect and encourage the new inventor, or do they protect large businesses and monopolies? Practice would sometimes point out the last.
2. Software patent issue
If you invent a phonograph, you make it, sell it, done. Not so for software. Software is a stack-up of tons and tons of previous "inventions" (algorithms, or ways of doing something). You can't write a piece of software without "inventing" something along the way, but you also can't avoid to use previous "inventions". Software inventions should be seen as common field knowledge that needs to be shared. And I say needs; we would not have come past the MS-DOS age without this.
3. Free Software issue
Free Software doesn't only share the ideas of software, but also their implementations. Again, we would not have been far without Free Software of any kind (you can at least forget the Internet and Mac OS X, but there are more detailed examples that will tell you that you can forget A LOT of software). Simply put, Free Software relies on open (unowned) algorithms and program ideas, but has no model (like businesses have) for buying licenses to use "owned" ideas. IOW, the Free Software world would ultimately disappear as a result of patent law.
Summary: while patents MAY stink for business in general, they would simply DESTROY our software world as we know it, and replace it with something where our normal everyday innovation is very hard to find.
"We can confirm that Debian does *not* ship the version with the trojan horse. Our version predates it." [CA-2002-28]
I'm not really doing that, I'm drawing a parallel between the corporations that use patents as part of their arsenal in domination of capitalist (and socialist, and communist, and anarchistic) markets. More on why capitalist structures particularly in the conclusion. Patents are not an expression of capitalism, corporations are. To join the lot together, suffice to say that patents as originally intended have been subverted by large corporations that now have more say in world economic and social policy than politicians - and thus voters, who themselves are gradually more and more alienated from the politicians by many non voters' belief that abstaining from elections can still allow them to voice political opinions in public, and think they can still make change, when they forego their first, most basic politicial right to vote. So, patent law is suddenly standing up for these bastions of capitalism - the free market economy multinationals and large national tech firms - even though it is precisely this law that is supposed to support the little guy.
All in all, legislation is helping those that have, and oppressing those that don't. Add to that a growing litigation culture, and it's a spiral that only the most capitalist nations seem to be succumbing to. I wasn't fully clear in my argument because after a while of typing in SlashDot I suddenly have to go off and do something... but I'm reasonably pleased with some of the points I make and submit.
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
So KDE supports it. But where is Gnome? Why do they not support it at all (even if the FSF/GNU does)? Do the corporations behind Gnome (Novell, Sun..) to use their patent pool in europe?
Almost true, it receives a cut of patent renewals fees from the contracting states (Art. 39 EPC).
Nonsense.
Irrelevant as long as its running costs are covered.
Unsubstantiated fantasy
But no shareholders so what reason is there for the EPO to maximise profits?
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.
WRONG - the poster was not only an Anonymous Coward, he is an anonymous know nothing.
Not to repeat what dozens have said, one fallacity is often overlooked:
When you talk about patents, many people have the lone inventor in a mental picture, and it's easy to convince them that he needs protection against the greedy corporations trying to steal his idea.
If you discuss software patents with someone, make sure you wipe out that picture. 99% of all patents are owned by the greedy corporations, not by the lone inventors.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Folks, patents are not evil. Throughout their history, they have protected innovation. It is not fair for someone to take the risk and toil to develop something truly new and unique, only to have someone elese who didn't have the foresight or the vision, rip off the idea and get the profits.
What *is* horrible is the US Patent Office and their incompetence in the area of software. They've granted patents for stuff I know isn't new or unique becuase I worked on the same thing 15 years earlier. And many of the process patents are just a joke.
Part of this isn't their fault. A lot of work done in the 70's, stuff that appeared in products, was never published. Most people did bother with software patnets. And most of the products are long gone from the market. SO it is hard to find the prior art, even when it exists.
What we need is a way t grant a provisional patent. The patnet wold be published, and those claiming to have knowledge of prior art that would render the patent invalid can contact the patent office and share the information. If the patent office finds that credible information that counters the claim has been presented, it would invalidate the patent.
The problem with today's system is that once granted, you have to go to Court to get a patent killed and that costs too much time and $$ for any but the ost valuable or outrageous claims to be fought.
On the one hand we have the EPC and the Guidelines which define the process and how the Examiner's should work. The process itself is followed in the sense that the EPO obeys the deadlines in the EPC and issues the correct official communications, apart from the occasional balls up. The issue is whether examiners are letting through cases they shouldn't.
I cannot think of an example, speaking as a patent attorney, of a case where the examiner seemed to allow a case just to get it off their desks. If we only consider the patentability of software as such, dodgy grants are more likely to be the result of a lack of relevant technical knowledge making arguments regarding the presence of technical effect seem more persuasive than they should. Also, since examination is an administrative not a legal process, the applicant tends to be given the benefit of the doubt.
It is now very easy to monitor European patent application publications. Anyone with an interest in a software product should set some time aside to look at the newly published applications. If any are not new or obvious, the prior art that shows this can be sent to the EPO, anonymously even, with a few paragraphs explaining the relevance of the prior art. If the invention seems to be just software, you can write to the EPO and explain why the invention merely uses software to solve a software problem, i.e. why it does not make a technical contribution.
Even if the examiner takes no action, the observations can have knock-on effects. For example, the patentee may not be allowed to amend the patent later to overcome your prior art because they allowed the patent to be granted knowing it to be bad. Prior art which is also relevant prior art for a corresponding US application will need to be notified to the USPTO by the applicant.
It is unlikely in the extreme that patents for software-implemented inventions which are technical in character, i.e. not-software as such, will be excluded from patentability. At one extreme, there are patent for televisions that employ software to process the television signals (patentable). At the nother extreme there are content management frameworks for web sites (sticking my neck out - unpatentable unless there is some effect such as a reduction in resource requirments for the same performance). In the middle are data compression and transmission systems and methods. Compressing video data can be performed using software and a PC or using custom hardware. If the custom hardware is patentable, what justification is there for not granting a patent covering the software + PC implementation? They both represent systems that operate according to an underlying algorithm.
There are other practical problems that are highlighted by cases where hardware and software implementations are possible. If a patent application describes a system comprising hardware than converts signal A into signal B and hardware for convering signal B into signal C, the main claim might be:-
A signal converter comprising means for convering a first signal into a second signal and means for converting the second signal into a third signal.
In Europe, this claim would be infringed by a hardware only device, software + a PC and by a hybrid embedded processor device. It would be difficult to frame a law that distinguished between these three examples.