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.
... is how the EU will spin the protests. I don't know if EU citizens are any more intelligent than the American sheeple, but a couple well-placed "digital terrorist" or such phrases could easily get ignorant people thinking the wrong way. (Japan, on the other hand, is getting worse and worse due to extreme apathy... you should see some of the election turnout numbers over here. It's scary.)
Let us not forget that Free (as in speech) is what we are still fighting for.
I don't know about you, but personally, I'm fighting for Free (as in beer) beer.
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]
I am worried that the members of the European Parliament have the impression that the protests are not to be taken seriously, coming mostly from outspoken Open Source enthusiasts. These are too often regarded as not respecting intellectual property, only out to use software, ideas and information without having to pay for it.
While the opposite is generally true: why run Linux and OpenOffice.org instead of an easily obtained illegal copy of MS Windows and MS Office?
I just hope that the MEPs understand nobody has to gain from software patents as proposed in the directive, except a bunch of patent lawyers, patent pirates, and big software companies (and the latter not even in the long run).
Innovation will be stifled instead of promoted.
Small and medium sized software developers (not only open source) and the consumer will pay the price.
Let's see if the members of the European Parliament remember their mandate and vote in the interest of the European citizen!
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?
I don't understand why being philosophically against software patents is always equated with socialism, and that patents are the ultimate expression of capitalism. I don't agree.
Patents in general are entirely anti-capitalistic devices. Their primary purpose is to inhibit competition, by making it illegal to compete. They enforce monopolies at best, and at their worst totally destroy entire fields of endeavor due to their mutually-assured destruction effect. They are not just about protecting theft of trade secrets, dumpster diving, or espionoge; but about controlling both thought and activity. If I completely and totally independently discover the same trivial algorithm, but you patented it somehow I'm breaking the law...I certainly didn't steal anything. Is anybody else worried about how IBM is dealing with SCO? I'll be as glad as anyone when IBM flattens them, but using their patent treasure chest to do so really bothers me.
And it also drives me crazy when I hear companies say they obtain patents for defense only. 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. That's agression plain and simple. If you want a defense then publish, don't patent (go to ip.com's Prior Art Database as an example of this approach).
And another misinformed justification is that patents are only dangerous if you try to make money with the patented idea. That is so wrong, go read the actual patent law! (yes it is very long, but still more readable than most patents). Even if you "practice" a patented idea in your home for your own amusement you are still breaking the law. You may get by with it, just like speeding, but patents intrude on everybody's rights.
I had an employer approach me once with the idea of patenting some software I wrote for them, and I took it as a serious ethical threat, and I told them that too. But when that happens, you tend to be very careful about how you apply your talent afterwards...being careful not to invent anything new, which I'm sure has resulted in some less than optimal solutions. But again, this is not socialist thinking. My company makes money from selling software I write, and I give them ownership over it in exchange for a salary, and I'm not distributing this code to the world. But likewise, I'm definitely against preventing somebody else from independently inventing the same software.
And the only reasonable argument for patents (as eliquently stated in the US Consitution) is to discourage the hording of information, so that others may build upon and progress technology. But look at how the patent system really works to completely subvert and prevent that one goal: submarine patents (those that through legal trickery stay in a filed state for perhaps decades without ever being divuldged). Patent laywers make sure that patents are entirely unreadable...even most lawyers who don't specialize in patent law are completely inept at reading them, let alone inventors and technologists who supposedly should be benefiting from them. Also it's almost impossible to ever find anything or make any sense of all that knowledge as its locked up so tight that it's completely worthless for anything but legal agression. The patent office should operate like a well indexed library of human knowledge, but instead it acts like a black hole locking away information so it is illegal to use.
I for one mostly agree with the capitalistic society, not the socialistic view. But I'm still extremely anti-patent, especially for non-physicial inventions of thought and expression. Patents are an extreme offense to humankind, captialism is not.
As long as we are imagining things, how about this: You labor very hard (and independently!) on a graphical app only to find that a large corporation has a patent on "a method for conveying the intention for an action to occur on a graphical display" (ie. clicking your mouse). Who's fucked now?
Remember that corporations can trivially afford to patent anything which does not have prior art whereas your small inventor cannot.
In short: Read the fucking protest page and think. Please.
HAND.
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]