Slashdot Mirror
Demonstration Against Software Patents in Europe
bram.be writes "On April 14, FFII is organising a
walking demonstration in
Brussels against the legalisation of software patents in Europe, as
well as a legislation
benchmarking conference. Like in August last year, these events will be accompanied by an
online demonstration whereby webmasters are asked to close their websites
in protest. The reason for the renewed protest is that after the
European Parliament voted for a
great directive, it
is now the Council of Minister's turn, whose working party proposes as
'compromise' to simply discard all good amendments and on top of that to
even make program publication an infringement. Already more then 1300 sites participate in the online demonstration. Among them are some big sites like KDE, the GNU Project and the Gimp. Also, on April 15 the European
Greens/EFA group is organising a Euro-LUG
party inside the European Parliament, 'with a view to enhance the
networking among the free software community in Europe [...], to inform
the EP about what free software is, how it works and which ideas lie
behind.' Speakers will include Gwen Hinze (EFF), Jon Lech Johansen
(DeCSS), Georg Greve (FSF Europe and Alan Cox. Prior
registration is mandatory for this event."
"Like in August last year, these events will be accompanied by an online demonstration whereby webmasters are asked to close their websites in protest. "
This online protest started April 5th... Why hasn't Slashdot joined this protest? Too European? Too much revenue at stake?
When it comes to reporting about how much they hate patents, Slashdot is tops. But when it comes to action, zero is taken. Arguing impartibility, with the high number of editorial opinions usually appended to story submissions, is weak.
I'm glad everyone's decided to take it to the streets, I think it will bring a lot more attention to the subject than with only online demonstrations.
Wireless News www.DailyWireless
..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
Why don't we revert to Moses original stone tablets, and be done with it?
Source code specifically, and software in general, are like food recipes.
Allowing patents on such would be like allowing someone to patent "sift 2 cups of flour with 1 tsp baking soda and 1/4 teaspoon of salt into a bowl".
When put in those terms the rediculousness of the idea becomes obvious. Unfortunately, you have to dumb things down for lawmakers to understand what they're dealing with... this should be simple enough for them to understand.
- Preferences: Solaris 10 (servers), Ubuntu (desktops), Solaris 11 (personal servers) -
Not if the patent system alows trivial patents that, if enforced, will bankrupt most developers.
>Patents are good and they have a reason. It protects personal IP and guarantees that other companies gonna pay licenses for using these patents.
This is good and desirable for what reason ?
Software is well protected by copyright that even extends beyond the 20 years protection you get by a patent.
The idea with patents is to make ideas public so others can expand on them and after a grace period (20 years in most cases) be used freely by everybody. Software on the other hand like litterature, paintings, poems etc. have been protected by copyright. The benefit of this have been that you do not need to file a costly patent application and your work is protected for much longer. This is in many cases much stronger than a patent, especially for software where I find it difficult to come up with any good examples of ideas worth patenting.
In Europe you have until now not been able to patent algorithms etc since mathematics have been considered a nature phenomenon that can be discovered but not invented.
That's a damn good point. Isn't the current state of patent law somewhat important to the "Open Source Development Network"?
So often, large organizations avoid taking politcal stances which are at all unpopular, and it is very sad. As we all know from the disgusting power of corporations, large organizations can often control the direction of the government. OSDN should take a position in this matter. It is relevant to OSDN and OSDN could help insitute change.
These companies are only pushing for software patents becuase they want to make money from their products. And your products as well. What's so unreasonable about that?
Although I sympathize with the protester's motives, I'm not sure how wise a website blackout is in the long-run. Were I an enterprise IT manager, I would not want my suppliers to be taking denial of service actions based on political issues that I don't necessarily care that much about. Blackouts will damage OSS' reputation with businesses.
If KDE, GNU, and Gimp want enterprise adoption, they would do well to maintain 100% uptime -- appearing to be reliable business-like providers of quality software.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
We're being flooded by polls lately. Why not put up a new poll, asking the Slashdot readers if they want slashdot.org to join the protest?
Do you want slashdot.org to join the protest against software patents?
[ ] Yes, the site has to be taken down completely and replaced by a protest page
[ ] Yes, but don't take it down, just replace the main page by a protest page, and let users click through to the real main page
[ ] No, don't take it down
[ ] CowboyNeal likes software patents
You are confused. It is not just 'open source entities' which are opposing this. Software patents help no one but extremely huge businesses and parasite companies like PanIP. Small businesses are overwhelmingly opposing this because they may find themselves locked out of the market once the big players manage to build up a shield of frivolous patents. Some large businesses are opposing this because they don't want to be repeatedly attacked by parasites.
Are you saying small businesses do not provide economic benefit?
Are you saying parasites such as PanIP provide an economic benefit?
This is even without getting into your strange assertion about open source not providing economic benefit (are you somehow saying that SUSE does not provide economic benefit to the EU, but Microsoft Corporation of Seattle, Washington does?) or your underlying assumption that economic benefits are the only kinds of benefits (for example, if the citizenry were converted to slave labor for the corporations, this would provide the maximum "economic benefit" possible, but is this a desirable situation?).
Compete on merit and quality and out sell the competition.
This is the entire problem; this is not possible in a software patent world.
The best would be if Google would participate. Ihat would have some efect..
The only group that benefits from software patent law are patent attorneys.
There is no economic justification or evidence, it is a pure legalistic move with no economic foundation. We won the debate.
Liberal Economists, SME, Programmers are against software patent law. Patent law is no felxible instrument that causes benefit in the area of software.
Only lawyers associations and the Business Software Allicance.
It a common prejudice by those you don't understand the reality of patent law.
I doubt it will save to IT world. More like lock it in for a few rich corporation like MS.
A book is protected by copyright laws. But words or letters aren't. Same for software, it makes sense to protect a program, but to protect a button or any other idea, that's ridiculous.
A library to compress an image (like JPEG) deserves protection, but the concept of image compression doesn't.
The last time this came up, a bunch of projects purposely screwed up their web sites as a protest. They made life miserable for the people who are changing the world by using free software.
Earth to protesters: the people you want to reach are the politicians and other puppetmasters with money, not the lowly geek who needs to install some software or look something up. The people who really matter for this kind of stuff aren't going to look at your web sites, and don't care if you take them down for awhile.
These actions annoy the wrong people, and may even hurt the cause by making key resources unavailable due to some badly-implemented plea for attention.
Here's an analogy for those who still don't get it: would you barricade the doors of the public library to protest the crap that's on TV? No? Then why block geek web sites when you're trying to reach politicians?
Pointing out specific implications, such as that if software patents were in widespread use in the 80s, the Internet would almost certainly not have emerged. Pointing out specific examples of the dangers. Pointing out the fact that there are numerous studies which point out the damaging effects of software patents, but none which demonstrate their value. These are the arguments we should be making.
I can understand putting a link on your site, changing the colour scheme for a week or even putting big eye-catching banners on the front page, but closing it?? whats the point? sure if it was a well known website out of geek circles like hotmail or google (just picking well known websites here not meaningful ones) then maybe closing it and putting a reason on the front page for a day would make sense, lots of people who have no-idea about software patents would read it and learn something, but im pretty certain that anyone who visits any open-source project site or anything related will already know whats going on and will just be abit pissed off that they cant get to their site! If google changed the artwork for their logo (like they do for various holidays) for a day the number of new people learning about this cause would skyrocket!
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
If not for patents, every smart idea you have will be ripped off by the BigMonopolisticCompany(TM) as soon as you mention it. Given their market position, they will force their customers to use their version. Given their financiar power, they can hire plenty of brilliant coders to implement your idea in no time. You'll be left with no customers, a window of opportunity of max one year and a huge hole in your personal finances.
By the way, patents are the reason why Sun got 1.6bil$ from Microsoft. Without patents, Microsoft could have just trample Sun into the ground without bothering to spend a dime.
As long as your only dream is to reimplement other people's ideas, then, of course, patents are bad. Be innovative and suddenly patents start to look good.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
FUD?
I think you said it right:
1. There are international treaties that clearly state what shall be patentable and what not.
2. the lawyer, i.e. case-law modified the law by decisions that perverted the meaning of the law.
3. The EU Commission wants to codify this in order to decrease the legal incertainty created by the misinterpretation. That is legalising a landgrab. The EU Parl reconfirmec the original rules.
'If I invent a new compression algorithm that is patentable, sure I want to _have the choice_ to either (a) patent it and make money from the patent, (b) dedicate it to the public domain for all to use.'
This is not the way patent law works in reality, a patent cost 60 000 Eur minimum legal fees. You cannot patent algorithms, but a patent attorney can write it in order to circumvent the law.
'If FFII had their choice, then my freedom for (a) would be removed, for some "specious" allegation that software patents are hindering innovation, when, in fact, the swathe of open source software and internet protocols/technology are evidence that software patents have not done anything to hinder innovation.'
Patents are a govermental granted monopoly priviledge that is justified by the idea to promote innovation. When this 'encourage innovation'-condition is not met the whole interference into the free market is wrong.
Patent law is an instrument of economic policy and shall not be applied in fields where it is not designed for.
There are many many projects that had trouble because of patents.
BTW: FFII is no FL/OSS organisation but a developers association. Many supporters write commercial software and everybody knows that this slow bureaucratic patent law does not work in the field of software.
To 1)
Yes, but currently there is a way in Europe to delete illegally granted patents.
Patents don't play a role in European software development business. Most developers have never seen a patent. Most software patents are granted to non-software developing companys from outside Europe because of the weak patent office standards that circumvent the law.
What of these patents that wetre already granted are worth to get a patent? Which of these cover real innovation?
See http://webshiop.ffii.org
If I invent a new compression algorithm that is patentable
.GIF image compression? Nope... they just kept other people from benefiting from the presence of a perfectly-reasonable file format for 8-bit graphics. The patent royalties they earned were probably just about enough to pay for the staff of lawyers in charge of collecting them.
The problem is, there's no way you can possibly do that without building on other, similar "inventions" that came before yours. There's not much new under the sun in the data-compression business. What, besides archaic patent laws, gives you the moral right to conduct your own personal IP land rush? It's safe to say that your "inventions," no matter what they may be, are economically feasible only because the people who came before you did not patent their own work.
What if Bresenham had patented his line-drawing algorithm? What if Catmull had patented texture mapping? What if Naylor had patented spatial-partitioning trees? What if Wozniak had filed patents on the hundreds of innovations in PC architecture that the Apple II embodied? Answer: instead of extolling patent protection on Slashdot, you'd be busy playing Zork on your TRS-80.
Because the modern legal trend in the patent field is toward patenting ideas rather than implementations -- something that the US patent system, at least, was never originally intended to allow -- patents on any of those examples would have walled off entire segments of computing and graphics research for decades, just the way Unisys's patent on LZW compression discouraged people from using and improving upon the lineage of that particular algorithm. At the end of the day, did Unisys make much money from their "ownership" of the algorithm used in
Dahlmann tightly grips the knife, which he may have no idea how to use, and steps out into the plain.
Actually, that's exactly the point. Ideally lots of geek sites going offline will inconvenience folks who need information and rely on them day-to-day. This being larger shops, companies in the IT area, and people who support the non-geeks. People take free software for granted, and as they say, you only realise what you had when it's gone.
Imagine for a moment if every site running Apache suddenly stopped. Every mail server running a free sendmail or postfix. Every ISP with Linux on their modem server or OpenBSD on their firewall. That's extremis, and against the nature of free software. It's also exactly where we are going with DRM commercial software from the big boys - don't pay your subscription? whoops, your database just stopped working! replace it with free one? nope, sorry, there's a patent on the transaction management that your software needs...
So while culling your webpage is pretty minimal, but it's just about the only leverage many OSS developers have. And although I agree somewhat with the poster saying it only affects us geeks, if big "mainstream" geek sites like Slashdot shutdown, it's got a sporting chance of being noticed by regular non-geek media.
Unfortunately, "Slashdot's value" is getting eyeballs onto ads, and if we know there's nothing to see for 2 weeks... well,that means there's no ad-money for Monkey Boy. You guys want to REALLY make a statement? Don't come to Slashdot for the next few weeks. Slashdot gets it's value from folks like you and I discussing amusing/interesting articles that other folks like you and I submit. If we ain't here - no value - protest enacted.
See you in a week or so.
Forget thrust, drag, lift and weight. Airplanes fly because of money.
Closing a website is a pretty pointless protest. We would all be far better served if all of the participating sites carryed headline stories about the issue at the heart of these protests.
This would raise awarness rather than simply pissing off a ocuple of users.
This protest is going to be inneffective. The proper way to protest software patents, and the reckless issuing of patents in general is to start applying for them left and write. Just like the GPL uses copyright against itself, we should all be applying for software patents left and right (and any other kind of patents) and follow that by sending cease and desist letters to large corportations. If enough of us created a hassle for the corporations, they would be begging for the patent law to change.
On another note, why is nobody doing something similar in the USA to oppose the DMCA? Yes, I realize it's already a law but laws are made to be repealed. The DMCA is just as dangerous to us as software patents are to Europe (yes, one in the same). Why aren't more people organizing against it in the USA?
Join the protest against European software patents!
Anthony Papillion
Advanced Data Concepts, Inc.
"Quality Custom Software and IT Services"
From a case law perspective!
i mage_view
But we talk about statutory law. Lawyers do not understand software. Only parliament has legislative powers and can express the will of the people. Lawyers may not reverse the meaning of the law they can oly adopt it. And when they reverse the meaning of it, they have to be stopped by a clarified law. Yes, the patent courts are influenced by the patent attorney industry that is intrested in widening the scope of patent law so that everything under the moon can become patentable whether it is economically justified or not, whether it harms the economy or not. When law has cancer we need to cure it.
I don't want my grandmother to buy me a shirt. I don't want to understand the crap misinterpretations of patent attorneys. Read a few patents, dig further into the law and get yourself informed. So when the lawyers fail then we have to clarify and defend the law.
And old Frisian proverb says
"Wer nicht deichen will muss weichen"
Who does'nt want to dike will have to leave the land!
Lawyers - the vampires of information society.
----------
you misunderstood mean: you can patent an algorithm as embodied in a software program,
--> a "computer-implemented invention"
but you cannot patent the algorithm itself
--> in some parts of the world, you cannot make a real distinction. Usually algorithms or complicated stuff is not patented but the pretty obvious.
Just read a few software patents, for instance Sun's shopping cart ( it's a long description of simple applied web design every php programmer does without even thinking of inventions),
Expace net Shoppingcart patent
Sun's claims:'1. A computer-executable process, embedded in a computer-useable medium, for supplying items on a network (46), the network having at least one computer-server (20) for communicating with users employing a browser program on a terminal/computer (35) at a location remote from said computer-server, said embedded process comprising the steps of:
receiving (152), at the computer-server, a transmitted command from said browser program for a shopping page (40);
in response to said transmitted command, generating (154) a shopping page file and transmitting (156) the shopping page file to said browser program;
receiving (168), at the computer-server, at least one user selected item from the shopping page received (158) by the browser program;
creating (174) a list at the computer server;
at the computer server, adding (178) to the list each user selected item received by said receiving step;
returning (184) from the computer server the list of items in an entry of a shopping page file to said browser program; and
continuing user selection (200), receiving (168) data strings, adding (178) items to said list and returning (184) said list until termination by the user. [and so on] '
Or take a look at this graphic
http://plone.ffii.org/prmat/EP1278133a2/
Yes, there are software patents in Europe, most of them trivial and x-applied by non-Europeans. For me the question is not how to improve their legal securtiy (EU-Commission), but how to get rid of them.
I think its pretty obvious that slashdot doesn't care.
1) They didn't participate last time.
2) They still use GIFs for crying out loud. Switching would be so very little work.
To counter your own FUD...
1) The European Parliament voted last September to exclude pure software in the legislation, so it couldn't be patented. The FFII isn't campaigning against legislation, it's campaigning with the Parliament to stop the Council and Commission from bodging the legislation and hoodwinking MEPs who don't understand the issues.
2) Software has been patented in the EU for decades, but software patents have not contributed to the development of the software industry
3) Patents are harmful. They have been one of the key tools employed by companies like Microsoft and Apple in buying up and demolishing competition.
4) Patents are not needed if you want proprietary software. Copyright it, license it under a proprietary license, and you're protected. For someone to duplicate your work legally, they'd have to do all the code again, which is far from nontrivial.
You don't really give any reasons why they are needed, why they're desirable. But you do mention various technologies ("the swathe of open source software and internet protocols/technology") that aren't patented, or haven't had patents used to control their use. Did they need patents to innovate? No, so why have them?
Imagine, on the other hand, if the inventors of HTTP, TCP/IP and other technologies had patented them and restricted their use. Imagine if every implementation of TCP/IP had to pay royalties. Imagine if every web site owner had to agree to a list of terms and conditions of use, and pay a cut of any profits to Berners Lee.
The reason we can't think of lots of examples of harmful patents off the top of our heads, and why we rely on the good research of the FFII, and a lot of studies by economists, is that those patents have kept us in the dark.
Society needs technology protocols and standards to be in the public domain, whether you're a card-carrying member of the Free Software Foundation or a long-time Microsoft user. Patents aren't going to bring us this.
Really, before launching in and accusing the FFII of FUD, you should at least read their material, read some of the many independent studies they mention, and get your facts about the history of patents in the EU correct.
But that's exactly the effect that software patents have. That's what they do!
Not just in the free software community, but in commercial non-free software as well: I have seen good, sensible functions not used in many a commercial product, precisely because (x) patented them.
Did you mix up copyright and patenting? Copyright let you place restrictions on your unique software. Patents let you place restrictions over broad functions, so that competitors can't use those functions, or anything similar.
In practice competitors do use the same broad functions despite patents. However, they do so by either being very large businesses with big legal teams and strong patent portfolios of their own, or they simply hope not to be sued. Because there is no way to be sure of not being sued, if you operate in a country where any kind of idea may be patented.
When businesses survive by hoping not to be sued, that is not a healthy way to run a marketplace. Healthy markets with healthy results are based on the open sharing of information, not perpetually trying to hide what you do.
-- Jamie
All the protests and marches in the world won't change a thing here. You honestly think that the governments of the world can do _anything_ about this, even barring the fact that none will even try to give this more than lip service? First, the politicians are corrupt and bought off. Second, the governments are totally addicted to proprietary SW. Third, no one other than a small minority of nerds and geeks know, or care if they do know. Fourth, even if somehow a popular uprising were to occur, the participants would simply be labeled terrorists, and EFF, FFII, and any other similar groups would earn a cruise missile in their headquarters, and the survivors imprisoned or killed. The membership lists would be seized, and the members rounded up, tried in a kangaroo court and imprisoned or executed. You have _no_ power to change anything, the notion that you do is only allowed to provide a way to let the discontents blow off steam. The corporate-owned governments have already established themselves in power and taken away any ability of the populace to change anything that actually matters. Scream, lobby, march, boycott, whatever makes you feel like your rights or opinions matter. It won't affect _anything_ that would change the direction this is going. It's already far too late.
For the long run it saves the IT world so people can still make money with the stuff they create.
As far as I know, no one can make money with software they create who couldn't do so without software patents.
Instead, with software patents, many people cannot make money with stuff they create (nor create and distribute free software) in cases where they can without software patents.
Of course, those few who can still make money in areas that are covered by patents can make even more money because there is no competition.
Monopolies are hardly what saves the IT business. Some giant IT corporations with large patent portfolios (e.g. IBM, Microsoft) can profit from software patents, but on the whole the IT business loses. Who profits most are patent lawyers - when IT companies have to spend money on patent disputes, which they could otherwise use for research and development.
The problem is: on the international level treatys are established, so patent law may bcome unreversible what I think is very dangerous. We need civil society support. And of course a strong pressure may improve the situation on the long run. The fTC report about the software patent system was very intresting. In the USA the lawyers talk about Europe's patents and the other way around. We know it is a conspiracy of the legal community, a hostile takeover. We can make a lot of media fuzz. Publicity is the death of king.
This, like many other stories, was submitted and rejected earlier. Some /. moderators find politics boring (especially non-US politics), and they are right. :-) However, if this isn't "Stuff that matters" I don't know what is.
NO software patents are not a good thing, thats the entire point. All evidence points to your cognitive skills being sub-standard, that or you are deliberately avoiding the REAL debate whilst making a silly analogy in an attempt to justify the unjustifable. I can cite economic reports and real cases that show software patents for the horror which they are, the pro patent lobby has yet to present ANY such evidence.
However frustrating this is to all of us (especially those among us that went through the trouble of travelling to Brussels and Strasbourg to make our voices heard and those of us who will be visiting Brussels the coming week): there is a big possibility that The European Commission is going to overrule a democratic process by the European Parliament and will vote in favor of unlimited patentability of ideas, including software.
;) )
Although we must continue to resist this as much as legally possible, we must also look further forward and think about how to battle the evil of software patents if they become a reality in Europe as well.
Granted, the current patent system currently works almost excusively in favor of large corporationas and empowers them to squash any newcomers, therefore allowing the large corporations to permanently consolidate their market share and influence.
Let's look at allegories in our past: the exploitation of the working class individual by large corporations during the Industrial Revolution. One man was no match against the large corporations. After all, if someone did not agree to the working conditions, the working hours and the meager salary, they'd just throw him out. There were more than enough others available that were eager to take his place in spite of all this.
The answer to this was found in Trade Unions. One man could not make a difference, but a large group of men could. With the founding of Trade Unions, the companies were forced to negotiate with the Trade Unions and offer better conditions and more reasonable pay.
Now suppose we used the Labor Union example as a model to form a similar foundation. An Open Source Community Patent Trust. (Everyone here that can think of a better name, please step in.
I've been impressed with many new true innovations coming from the Open Source development community lately. Everytime I saw a cool new idea being developed by someone or some group within the Open Source community, my enthusiasm about the coolness of the innovation would be further enhanced by an additional sense of relief: "The Open Source community developed this first and put it on the map. There's no way anyone can take this away from us, now that we have demonstrated prior art."
The point is that we underestimate as well as fail to harness all these impressive innovations.
Now if we founded a International Non-profit organisation that any developer could subscribe to (which would require a periodic subscription fee, just as labor unions do) and would use the subscription money to finance as much patents on Open Source software innovations as possible, then its patent portfolio (which it would manage and protect on behalf of the entire community) whould steadily grow and grow.
A comittee (consisting of both developers and enlightened law experts such as the good people at Groklaw) would evaluate which of the donated ideas would we worth patenting, constantly keeping the current budget for expensive patent applications in mind.
Now in order to prevent all major corporations from collectively turning on this foundation, it would be a very important guideline for it to work purely defensively on behalf of itself and its members. It simply couldn't afford picking unnecessary fights, especially not early on in its existence.
As soon as a member of the foundation were bullied by a company accusing them of patent infringement, the foundation could then bring the entire worldwide community's collective patent portfolio to bear against this company. Alternatively, the foundation could spend some money from its defense fund to fund the victim's legal expenses. That way, the victim could more easily decide to go ahead with a lawsuit, instead of having to back off purely because of the threat of litigation. That alone could force many companies to think twice about starting an infringement case, since actually going ahead with the case could also res
"Oooh, does that mean we get to kick some puffy white mad zionist butt?"
No, the protests can make a big difference. I don't trust the European Comission, but the European parliament does in fact care, it decided against software patents, and it is important that it doesn't give in. Before the decision in the European Parliament I thought the main danger was that many members would not really look at it. Only the green parties and the radical left were clearly against software patents, and that would be a relatively small minority. Manifestations, letters to members of the parliament, conversations with them probably played an important role - and the majority in the European Parliament then voted for amendments that prevent software patents. That was a big victory, and it is important to go on and not to give in.
Certainly, the rich and well-organised lobbies, such as BSA, are influential. But it would be wrong to think that all members of the parliament are bought by them. If nothing is done, they may follow these influential organisations, but if good arguments are presented, many of them can be convinced.
Democracy in the EU is far from perfect, but it is not doomed or inexistent, either.
instead of closing the sites, use them for coordination of email. I will be polite here and NOT recommend DdOS attacks,but the effect of a polite but overwhelming presence becoming felt. Just encourage millions (whatever) of people to send a LOT of emails to every place that can take an email,places like newspapers (every editor and reporter there, and their advertisers), those patent offices (every employee email addy that can be found), the various politicians (all of them, their staffs, etc), broadcasters,lawyers, academecians etc, etc,etc along those lines. Make the email usage during the protest spike severely across the net. Many many emailers sending out a LOT of emails apiece. Every protester send a well written detailed statement of opposition, outlining the "why" of the protest and offering a "better solution" than software patents to every single email addy that can be found to a relevant person who has anything to do with the patents, and to anyone in a position of legal influence or in the media.
If people want to visit my site and download my code that's fine with me but I never asked them to. I pay for the bandwidth to distrubite my software so if I decide to put a splash page on my site you can click-through or fuck off! Most commercial sites inconvenience me more than this with 1/2 page ads, click through ads, click through licenses, javascript, popups and refusing to serve pages to any web-browser that isn't IE (screen readers as used by the blind etc).
Arrogance is attempting to over-rule democracy and thinking you can get away with it.
Actually the price for a flight is about UKP120* from London. Go from London City, it's cheaper than Heathrow to Brussels. Coaches from the biggest cities to London are on special offer at UKP1-5 right now.
It's still a bit much. Coach all the way to Brussels is UKP52 from London.
-- Jamie
* - why does slashdot eat my pound signs? -- Jamie
1. (This one will probably cause me to get modded flamebait) It seems that the most outspoken of the Slashdot community are in fact stupid and immature. No offense intended.
2. There is a very big difference between copyright and patents, and you would do well to learn it. Journalists can't legally plagiarize each other because of copyright. If news could be covered by patents, the vast majority of news media would cease to exist. Patents are about inventions. A patent can be infringed upon even if the infringing party has never heard of the invention that is patented.
3. I can't claim to know of a solution that would satisfy both the FOSS camp and the proprietary software camp. However, it seems to me that FOSS and software patents can't coexist. They only seem to coexist now because not all possible building blocks of software are encumbered by patents...yet. If this were to ever happen, FOSS would cease to exist beyond a vague memory (and likely a black market). If software patents are allowed to continue, this will inevitably be the result, and that scares a lot of people, myself included. I think that the fear of this possibility is what is causing people to become "overly emotional" and attack software patents in any way they can. This is an act of desperation.
Every time you run "emerge", a Microsoft drone dies.