EU Parliament Approves Software Patents

AnteTempore writes "The voting has just ended. Few good and several bad amendments were accepted. The directive proposal was accepted: 361 for, 135 against, 28 abstentions. The precise numbers and results for each amendment will be available on europarl.eu.int tomorrow." Reader swentel submits this report on the vote (French) with slightly different numbers (364 voting yes, 153 No, 33 abstaining) but just as bad. Watch this story for updates. Update: 09/24 15:44 GMT by T : Dr.Seltsam writes to say that the early reports are "not quite correct. The German publisher Heise states in this article, that the vote concerned strong changes on the directive." In particular, "pure software patents will not be allowed." Google's translation engine does a decent job with the German.

Comments

Depressing.

[eddy]

The most positivt thought I can have is that "maybe things must go to worse before they can get better".

<sigh>

Re:Depressing.

[root 66]

the problem is that we had worse far too many times already.

But people just don't learn from history.

Example: my dad is born 1930, thus lived through the decade of Hitler's regime, and luckily survived the bomb raids on Cologne as well as nearly being shot because his father told him not to go to the HJ.

Yet he does not see that today our freedom is taken away again, not by a dictator. But by the system itself.

Capitalism as we face it today is a holocaust in itself (and was since the beginning of industrialisation).
The system tries to assimilate everything and everyone, erasing everything that's different (nature being one example).
It makes us part of a machine: no choice, no freedom in the end. Just food for the money printers. Synchronized, automatized living - great.
Of course, there are few people that take advantage of it. The low percentage of people that despite economic depression gets richer everyday. But they themselves don't understand that they are only part of a giantic world machine.

Panem et circenses.

I wish there was still a free, sane place on this planet.

What happens to the world..

[Talonius]

..when so many corporations own patents on so many intangible things that a corporate dynasty like IBM can bring anyone in the world to their knees financially.

Even foreign governments.

Intellectual property in all of its various forms is being abused by the corporate world - both friends and foes of Linux and otherwise. The madness is the laws supporting this behavior continue to pass, bypassing the individual and wholeheartedly supporting the corporation.

Isn't the government supposed to be working for us? Aren't our rights supposed to be first and foremost in their minds? There is a balance to be maintained, and our rights are not unlimited, but more and more across the entire globe the individual is lost.

Not to be funny but has anyone considered the implications of all these recent intellectual property rights and how it seems more and more that we're being pushed into the draconian future of Johnny Mnemonic and Shadowrun? The only way you get information is to steal it. The only way for another corporation to get information is to hire you to steal it.

I grow more and more distressed at the world my son will grow up in, the conditions he will consider normal, the laws he will break just by trying to think.

Talonius

Re:What happens to the world..

[rhadamanthus]

Intellectual property is a myth. You CANNOT and SHOULD not be able to own an idea. I am beginning to think that this may be a real turning point in civilization as we know it. Imagination and the associated innovation based off that imagination is what makes us able to do so many amazing things. Now, you can imagine building something to change the world, you can even imagine how to build it, but if someone has previously thought of it, you are in for a losing legal battle. This may be an extreme statment with regard to software patents, but the premise is frightening in either scenario. This is a legal restriction on free thought and development. Software patents are just one piece of the larger takeover.

--rhad

It seems that

[jimius]

It seems that the struggle to avoid Europe becoming like America isn't really working. There are a lot of things happening over here in Europe which we call "American circumstances". Things such like frivolous lawsuits, higher gun-related murders/accidents, apathy and now software patents.

I believe poeple don't want to live in an "American Europe".

Re:A quick translation...

[timbloid]

so that a data-processing program is patentable, it is not enough that it is new, it is necessary still that it allows a technical innovation independently of its own execution.

So, if I write a dataprocessing program that can be used by another piece of software to do something new....then I can patent it...or the other bit of software...or neither...

The text of origin was considered to be "fuzzy" and "ambiguous"

Looks like they did a good job clearing it up... ;)

Re:Indicative

[rhadamanthus]

"the counter-argument is that the corporate interest _is_ the public interest"

That is a disturbing statement. It reminds me of the quote by General Motor's President Charles Wilson: "What's good for the country is good for General Motors, and vice versa." This is flawed logic. Corporations may employ people, but their only interest is profit. Time and time again we see that the interest of the people is NOT the interest of corporations. Read some books, google Monsanato's milk hormone problems, Exxon's complete disregard for people in Alaska afer Valdez, car manufacturer's intentional ignoring of safety studies in the 60s, big pharmaceutical companies that cover up defects etc. It goes on and on. Corporations do serve a purpose in employing people, but that purpose is moot if they then go about eroding centuries of work to place the will and health of the people above any other entity. You have a good point too, but it is rendered dangerous and defeatist upon investigation: working solely for the corporate interest is courting disaster without appropriate regulation, or better yet, true accountablity.

--rhad

Re:Indicative

[JaredOfEuropa]

the politicians who are supposed to represent the people/national interest.

Ah, but the politicians are representing national interests in this case... or at least they think they are.

I know Bolkenstein, the man who drafted the original Directive, from when he was active in national politics. His line of thinking is 'good for corporations = good for the economy = good for the people'. He fails to see how this equation is false in many cases, including the case at hand. Because of this line of reasoning, he will give more weight to the opinion of large corporations, whose impact on the economy is largest. Smaller companies carry less weight, and the least weight of all is given to the voice of an individual person.

Another issue with Bolkenstein and many, many, many other politicians is that they believe that most issues are way too complex for the common people to understand. That is why they think they act in our interests even if they go against our express wishes'. And it's not just the majority of the common people, but all of them: professors and garbage collectors are all equally ignored. In true spirit of the Dutch 'poldermodel', the only groups that have this politician's ear are corporations, unions, and other politicians.

Re:Bleh.

[kmurray]

Small companies can't afford to go around patenting every little detail of their software, like some big companies. Lawyers cost money, lots of money. I know.

The real problems is the broadness of the patent law. The people giving out the patents have no idea what makes the patent novel. Patents should be revolutionary, not evolutionary. Crap is getting let through and then it is off to the races with attorneys. Then who wins?

Would you really like that?

[mericet]

Would you really like the NCSA or Netscape to have a 20 year monopoly on displaying images with text or on hyperlinks ?!?

Yes, I prefer IE to exist, as long as I can also have lynx and opera and konquerer.

Competition, even agains MS lets the better products surface instead of getting us stuck with patent protected monopoly, inferior products.

Your gun manufacturer analogy is right on the money, patents can be used defensibly as can guns, but are essentially a destructive tool.

Plus, EU software patents can only harm EU competiveness, EU companies could always register their software patents in the US while ignoring US software patents in the EU. Now US companies will rush to register their patents in the EU.

Patents may have a place, but today's systems are really out of control.

Re:Bleh.

[SerpentMage]

I am sorry my good sir I most vehmently disagree with you.

Patents do nothing but slow down an industry and promote laziness....

1) Ford, which is considered the model on how to build cars and do processes HAD to get around patents so that he could build a car that EVERYONE can afford.

2) Windsurfer which invented the windsurfing board had a patent, which they only enforced two years before the end of the patent. Until five years before the end of the patent there was no Wind surfing industry. Windsurfer then cashed in and forced bankruptcy of major windsurfers. Where is Windsurfer today? Sitting on money doing nothing.

3) Laser had a patent which caused nobody to do anything with lasers. Once the patent expired we ended up with laser pointers, last light shows, etc, etc..

4) Patents CANNOT be bought and defended by "small" people. Patents cost about 40,000 EUROS a pop and this is not money for the "small" company. This is money for the large company.

Now about your reference to MS and Internet Explorer. Say what you will, but Netscape was no better than Microsoft. I was around in the Netscape days and they were bastards. Once I represented a company who wanted to purchase five thousand licenses to Netscape. Netscape ignored the company because it was too small and companies like Deutsche Telekom were more important.

Microsoft might clone ideas, just like all of the other companies do as well in the industry. The software industry is like writing, we all clone!

The problem in software are the contracts. For example why do I have to buy Windows 5 times for a single computer?

Sir, I would have wished that you would have used your lawyer abilities to reign in the contracts instead of going for the easy cash in Patents. Remember you are going to be responsible for a mess that *I* have to live in.

Re:Can someone explain Article 6a?

[Halo1]

First of all, the MP3 patents are software patents and as such are not valid in Europe. The base MP3 patent is on quantising a sound signal and then iteratively executing a (the patent doesn't mention which) mathematical function over these quantised values until they can be represented using the desired number of bits. That's it, it's not any more specific.

Now, suppose we would get software patents, then this article would allow you to use an mp3 decoder to connect some audio aparatus to another one which only outputs sound in MP3 format. It will not allow encoders, unless they are only used for encoding sound which is then fed into something which can accept only mp3 encoded audio. So it also won't allow plain mp3 players (I don't think that the argument "I want to make my MP3's interoperable with my earbuds" would hold).

It really is a restriction to make sure that a company with a dominant market position cannot exclude everyone else by making all of the interfaces of its machine depend on patented technology and thus doing a vender lock-in (since compatitors cannot make any compatible devices). Jonas