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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.
Nice to see this virus is spreading throughout the world. Want the big bucks, become a lawyer and sell your soul.
Der Tod ist der einzige Weg hier raus!
---rhad
Slashdot needs to interview Natalie Portman.
anything to stop me running thru the US patents list , picking some choice patents and taking out new patents based on them (perhaps ever so slightly modified) in Europe ?
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
It's not hard to see that this patent law will be used in Europe exactly as the DMCA has been used in the USA..
I.e to close websites and stiffle free speech.
And worse, it's very likely to be used to stop open source projects.
And for those that just woke up, I want to inform you that "justice" and "right" are not the things that make you win a court case.. Rather it's "money", "lawyers", and "lobbying".
echo '[q]sa[ln0=aln80~Psnlbx]16isb572CCB9AE9DB03273snlbxq' |dc
I wonder how many people will actually bother to understand what was and what wasn't passed.
Judging by the average post so far on this story, most readers are seeing this as a very black and white situation.
Passing bad, not passing good.
Free Gamer - Free games list and commentary
I suppose you Europeans can't hassle us Yanks as much for having draconian patent laws. Now you see how difficult it is to inform those in power what a bad idea they are.
However, it is certainly a sad day for software freedom in the EU and around the world. What is it we are not communicating effectively? Why does this keep happening again and again?
Then the shit's hitting the fan. It'll make 9/11 look like a fender-bender.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
Time for a global patent pool operated in the exlusive interests of open source software. Sue anyone for using an open source application, and you lose all rights to the patent pool that otherwise are freely available. Monetary donations could be used not only for operating expenses of the not-for-profit organization, but also for buying software patents where possible and economical.
Money would probably be most effectively used to hire patent attorneys in various countries to assist open source developers in patenting as many new algorithms and software methods as possible, assigning the patents to the not-for-profit pool.
If we as a community could build a big enough pool and sustain it, where the patents are available for use by anyone, royalty free so long as they do not initiate any software patent legal action against anyone, anywhere, it would be a sufficient deterrent to make software patents as close to irrelevant as can be achieved.
So where do I donate my $25?
Perhaps it's time to move to a small pacific island, antartica, etc, and establish a corporate-free techno-utopia. Then we'll show 'em what a truly free peoples can acomplish when we're able to innovate without massive gobs of greed getting in the way.
:-/
If we were successful, however, then the greedy whores would probably just sick thier puppet governments on us to eliminate the threat. ( Ohh, they've got butter knives! WMD! WMD! )
I know this all sounds extreme, but moving out is becoming a simpler choice than changing the government we have.
Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch. Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote.
Frits Bolkenstein of course being the famous Dutch politician who spent a decade or so sitting in the government lobbying on behalf of a pharmaceutical company (was a funny situation when it was discovered and all the commissions/bonuses paid etc were made public.He's quite cheap apparently. Of course he didn't resign or anything). So this is where he went. Great.
Can someone explain for me Article 6A, "Right to use of patented techniques without authorization or royalty, if needed solely to achieve software interoperatibility"?
Does this imply that, for example, Linux MP3 encoders are now legal in the EU, without royalty or authorization [or will be]?
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
Emitionaly, I agree with you. But you can not deny that development of several huge software packages for very small market segments are not feasible without pattents.
It's like farmaceutical industry (a total fuckup too by now) who need pattents to make sure they get return of investment over a period of several years. Unfortunate as it is, a lot of indistrial & technological progress would not have been made if pattents didn't exist. But I do agree wholeheartedly that this construction, which was ingenious and constructive by concept, has turned out to be a failure in practice. Much like communism, capitalism is collapsing under it's own inertia. The inertia of the USSR was lack of motivation, the inertia of our western world is fear of losing marketshare or corporate value.
When will I end this grieving ? When will my future begin ?
If we were successful, however, then the greedy whores would probably just sick thier puppet governments on us to eliminate the threat. ( Ohh, they've got butter knives! WMD! WMD! )
When you consider that in the past software, particularly encryption software, was considered WMD by the US and even now such dangerous machines as the G3+ and P3+ processors and PS2s are controlled exports on similar grounds, you are not far off. "Oh look, they have PS2s and Macintoshes with OpenSSH installed! WMD! WMD! Let's liberate 'em and have Hilary Rosen write their constitution!" :P
With respect to patenting, probably not very much will change, departing from this press release. It looks much like the policy of the European Patent Office (!= EU, Switzerland and Monaco are Contracting States as well).
I wonder what will be done with this one:
Another amendment specifies that the use of a patented technique is not regarded as a counterfeit [an infringing product] if it is necessary to ensure the communication between various systems or data-processing networks.
Does that mean that you can implement IEEE 1394 and USB without paying licensing fees, because you are not infringing? IAAL and I have not read it all, so I am not going to make a statement. But it doesn't look good for the larger companies.
FYI:
Infringement is not dealt with by the European Patent Office, it's being dealt with by national law (European Patent Convention, Art. 64(3)). And that is governed almost directly by this directive.
usual disclaimer : IANAL.
first, thanks guys for helping us understand the meaning of all that (I, for one welcome our new legal speech overlords).
I personally believe that this is not as much a big mess as I feared. Article 2 and 3 will hopefully filter out most of the junk already registered in USA.
I see it also as a basis to deal with USA domination in software production : European firms might be able to counterweight more 'fairly' (or at least fairly more) with their USA competitors.
Yet, of course, I wish all this didn't start in the first place.
I hope it doesn't come to that, but perhaps we need to start thinking about hosting open source software in a software patent free location. I would hate to see a great open source application disappear from Sourceforge because it "violated" some stupid software patent.
Our whole current "IP" scheme makes me sick. We are tying our hands with software patents, many of our Elderly (at least here in the good 'ole USA) cannot afford their medicine due to Pharma charging them out the Wazoo, we have the RIAA sueing 12 year olds and 71 year olds instead of changing with the times, and I could go on and on. I still hope that there will eventually be a popular uprising against what is going on, but I am not going to hold my breath. On second thought, perhaps a corporate-free techno-utopia is our only hope...
Beware of Sleestak
I am not so sure about the stupidity. Internally, software patents may be bad for individuals (but generally good for corporation.) Similarly, patents are good for a country so long as all other countries abide by intellectual property rules. They kind of need to do this in order to ensure trade. Therefore, the only way countries can compete is to enact the same kind of patent legislation and then encourage it's citizens to invent.
There are only 6,863,795,529 types of people in the world.
Europarl votes for Real Limits on Patentability
FFII News -- For Immediate Release -- Please Redistribute
See http://swpat.ffii.org/#news
Now we will have to see whether the European Commission is committed to "harmonisation and clarification" or only to patent owner interests.
Yesterday's threats uttered by Bolkestein against the European Parliament suggest the latter.
The detailed results are available on our site
http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/plen0923/
It will now be our job to help the European Parliament assert itself against attempts by Bolkestein and patent lawyers wearing the hat of national governments to crush the directive project.
The current text has some remaining contraditions in it, but basically the thrust has been turned around. It has become our directive which we must help the European Parliament to defend. This is also a question of the European Parliament's role in an emerging democratic Europe. On the whole this is very good news for the EU.
--
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance tel. +49-89-18979927
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation http://swpat.ffii.org/
270,000 votes 2000 firms against software patents http://noepatents.org/
Any sufficiently advanced libertarian utopia is indistinguishable from government.
According to heise.de software patents are not aproved.
/. storries are REJECTED.
... hundrets(nearly :-) ) of insightfull ratings on complete false comments :-) No wonder when the /. storry itself is false.
Most or all points under discussion in the latest
There are no software patents, no business methods and no algorithms patentable.
Interoperability between software, even if parts belong to patented devices, is granted.
Again
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
The detailed votes (with nominal votes) are - in MSWord format ... - at:f r/vot e/Resultats/Mercredi/Appels
http://www.europarl.eu.int/direct/documents/
nominaux 2003-09-24.doc
Contrarily to what you may hear or read from Reuters, this is truly a
victory against extension of patentability. Amendements have been voted
that completely overturn the original meaning of the directive to make
it a text that excludes from patentability any thing beyond the use fo
forces of nature to control physical effects and exclude explicitly any
form of information processing. In addition an amendment explicitly
stating than software claims can not be accepted has been voted.For
specialists 69-70-71-72 and first part of 55 + interoperability
exception have gone through.
I guess that the Green and GUE have voted against the global report
because they are afraid that this might be manipulated in the further
political and implementation proces (in particular they wanted another
version of the definition of technical - amendment 55 second half
instead of 6 to go through, but it was not even submitted to vote, based
on erroneous statement that 69 would be equivalent). I do not know teh
outcome on one important amendment (57).
This is nonetheless a historical turning point: for the first time, a
cross-party coalition has said no to the permanent extension of patents
and other forms of restrictions to free and open knowledge. Already in
1995 the Parliament rejected a first version of the biotech patents
directive, but this was a different coalition, much less clear, and
shortlived. TO measure the importance, see the detailed vote on
amendment 55 first half voted 300 to 223 with the PSE divided 2/3-1/3
and the PPE divided 1/3-2/3
The news releases announce the vote as a victory for patentability (see
Reuters). Let's hope that the truth will reach even the news.
Now let's get ready for the fights in Council. The voted amendments are
clearly unacceptable for those countries where the patent lobbies have
key influence, as well as for the Commission, so they will do anything
to get rid of them.
It is interesting how a headline can change things... German c't magazine - not suspicious of being pro-software patents - believes that the "good" (i.e. "anti-patent") amendments outweigh the "bad" ones. Their headline is something like "EU Parliament Stops Software Patents.
I would advise you not to get on to the rocket to mars yet, but wait for a thorough analysis of the laws actually passed.
Just my 0.02,
Alex
Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder
thanks.. and if somebody needed +20 informative this would be it.
and i'm pretty much replying just to get this noticed among the +5 modded crap that's just bitching about moving to mars.
(actually slashdot would need a '+20 storybreaker' moderation or something)
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
It should require a large majority vote from an "experts" panel who are told that the invention truly has to be innovative and new before a patent is allowed to go through (I am thinking of expert panels at least at the level used to judge finalists for high school science contests). Any patent that is easy for an expert to understand or implement should just not be a patent. To give you an idea of the high standard I would like to use, a patentable idea should be cleverer or more innovative then the ideas used either in HTML or the GIF format. A patentable idea should have the aura of obscurity and complexity; even to the expert.
"The only justification for a system of private ownership of culture (intellectual property), is the fostering of more and better creativity. Commerce is only a mechanism toward that end, not the end goal. When abusive patent, trademark, and copyright, stand in the way of advancement, it's time to change the system."
And the petition itself:
"Desktop molecular manufacturing" will mean an end to global trade, the end of resource-based wars, the end of wage-slave jobs, and the end of the need (for some people) for artificial scarcity to pay for what used to be scarce (food, clothes, etc).
Don't hold your breath, though. We've had the technology to create cars that run on water for years now. Ironically, cost and the existing oil cartel are two major reasons why we aren't driving them yet. What about electric cars?
We pollute the atmosphere because it's cheaper than to filter out all harmful elements - we do have the technology to cut emissions to almost nothing, but money is in the way.
So, I have a feeling that money will continue to be a barrier to the well being of the planet and its inhabitants for decades (if not centuries) to come. Maybe we'll all kill each other first.
I agree with you completely there. Money stops us from doing so much by maintaining scarcity where there is none naturally. Ever ask why we don't have good health care? Not because our med tech sucks, or there are not enough doctors; it's not enough money. Bad education: Not enough teachers? We don't know how to teach well? Nope, it's not enough money. This is true for basically all problems in North America. And since money is scarce, there can never be enough, no matter how you manage or re-distribute it.
This won't change until either the system collapses for some reason (and there are many), or we switch to a system that doesn't use money, and doesn't replace it with any other kind of artificial scarcity mechanisms. So far, only a Technocracy is able to do that.
Our ignorance is not so vast as our failure to use what we know. - M. King Hubbert