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."
Will /. participate?
People say I'm crazy, I got diamonds on the soles of my shoes...
"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.
Ths Gimp in a walking demonstration. The visuals are killing me...
--
Retail Retreat
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
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) -
Take a look at this demo of things to come w/ software patents:
http://webshop.ffii.org/
And if you're an European citizen, please sign the petition:
http://petition.eurolinux.org/
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 ?
There is still the lack of a strong corresponding US movement. However US citizens can help us. Mirror http://demo.ffii.org or the other sites, report the event to the media. Write articles, participate in the next WIPO round. Put pressure on your legal department.
And of course you can also organize events in your part of the world, demonstrations at the USPTO or DoJ.
Nobody software professional ever requested that bad old old bureaucratic patent law, the patent lawyers like to sell us. It is not the big against the small ones, it's a patent attorney's conspiracy!
There was no democratic decision ever about software patents in the States.
Living in London, isn't there some way I can participate? Surely this is being organised as some sort of Europe-wide demonstration in several key cities? How else can I join a protest if I don't have the time, money or inclination to fly over to Belgium?
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.
Please enlighten me... Would this make it possible for MS to get a patent on office suites?
Sig Nature
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.
Bah I say, I would have LOVED to go and support this but didn't know it was happening.
After just looking around the cheap flights sites, the cheapest I can now get is like 200 - and for a student thats just not viable. A month ago I could probably have got the flights for 50.
I just wish I'd had a bit more notice, and half of my universities compsci dept would have turned up with me!
One thing that could make patents on software a little more palatable would be to reduce the protection period to something that makes a little more sense on internet time. If a software patent was valid for say 3 years after filing this should give a good head start to any bright ideas and make it possible for the market to get full interoperability/documentation within reasonable time.
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.
So many people would vote for option (1) just because they want slashdot.org to go away that it would skew the results
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?
Here are some points in favour of the EU legislation:
1- software patents already exist, have been granted and so on (e.g. GIF in the US, for example, but others in the EU) - in the EU, it was confirmed by the Vicom case;
2- the legislation is _merely_ codifying case law practice into statutory to law to reduce the level of confusion (so you don't have to refer to case law);
3- despite the presence of software patents (e.g. gif), the progress of linux and open source has _not_ been hampered - in fact, in most cases, the presence of patents causes people to make workarounds, some of which are _better_ that the original patents (e.g. GIF -> PNG/JPG; VRRP -> CARP/PFSYNC);
4- stopping this legislation will not stop software being patentable because it already is (see 1 above);
5- not allowing patents for software means that you remove individual rights to the protection of the fruits of their labour - you _enforce_ an "open" social model on their inventions;
The FFII information is pure FUD - "for the last few years the European Patent Office (EPO) has, contrary to the letter and spirit of the existing law, granted more than 30000 patents " because the terms of the EPC (european patent convention) have been clearly interpreted that it is only software _as such_ (e.g. a whole program) not (a) systems that incorporate software as an element, or (b) technical mechanisms within the software.
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. 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.
I don't want rights to my inventive creations to be removed. I want the choice, and what I want the open source community is do is to educate me on how to use my choice, not to impose it upon me.
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.
if they do, the entire demonstration will probably slow down so much that nobody can get to it :)
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
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.
Sometimes, I like to get a piece of paper and just fill it up with right parenthesis, because of all the unfinished parenthetical statements in the world, to balance the universe.
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
Our protesting does absolutely nothing to sway them. We are a minute component of society with no financial clout and no connections. They most likely wouldn't miss us if we all up and vanished. We cannot cause enough trouble to cost people their offices, and our demise would please a lot of people who DO have money and connections. This is not an issue the public is worried about - they have other concerns than software.
Not that I disapprove. It's still better than nothing. But we need other contingency plans, because as far as the governments are concerned the loss of open source would not be a major one, and they will not respond to us. If we want to be effective, I think we need to look in another direction.
Specifically, if software patents are to be given power and we can't stop it, I think we should propose an compromise. If they are going to go through with this, they need to also create a mechanism by which people can document for the patent office intellectual property without any of the large fees associated with the patent filing process. This new filing path wouldn't grant the filer any unique rights to the IP - it would, however, constitute documentation of prior art which has been filed with the patent office and they are responsible for when considering new tech patents. This is the only answer I can think of which might hault the granting of absurd patents. Allow us to document all our ideas cheaply in such a way as to block patents being granted which involve obvious ideas. I would call it a Declaration of Prior Art. The filer doesn't need to be the one who had the original idea - just someone who can properly describe and document it. Then, if the patent office grants a stupid patent, we can point them to files in their own database that rule it out.
So by all means protest the patents, but remember They Don't Care. What we need instead is a method to impact the workings of the patent office. So let's lobby for the addition of a Declaration of Prior Art section to software patents. We can argue that it would help the patent office do its job, and I don't think anyone would actually have the guts to publicly state they want to take advantage of the patent office's ignorance in this field. Let's try and lobby for a mechanism where we can help the patent office be unable to grant stupid patents. That might actually provide us with a defense when (not if, IMHO) they eventually get software patents through. There's just too much $$$ behind software patents - I have zero expectation the political system will stop them based on anything like ideals. So let's get practical, and look for ways we can do more than just protest.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
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.
what is the point of this? I mean the sites that are being taken down are already anti-patent and the people who visit it are also already anti patent. How often does anyone here even visit the GNU website? we have a minority of the people in a minority group (those who use OSS ) protesting this. i see it as ebinf as effective as me shutting down my site in protest of law x... no one who aready does not does not care will care.
The war with islam is a war on the beast
The war on terror is a war for peace
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"
What's unreasonable is that it prevents me from making money from my products.
What's unreasonable is I can sit in my home and develop some great new software and then I can't publish it if it's the kind of software which is against the interests of established big business. I can't sell it: as a small business, I'd lose more from litigation than I'd gain from sales. Even some big businesses are uneasy with all the work they have to put into patent defense.
If I produce an excellent product, I can sell it - to a big company with a strong legal team. I can't run a small shop selling controversial software products, all I can do is pass it on to a big company for them to decide what they want to do with it. Or maybe I can sell it under the radar. Be careful not to advertise too much. (That doesn't seem reasonable to me). Or look small but grow fast, so I can become a big company myself if I'm lucky. (But I don't want to run a big company; why should I have to?)
The core of this issue is that patents favour businesses who retain a large legal department. Exactly the sort of business I don't want to have to be.
That strongly favours big business structures. It's not good for everyone who might actually want to use my products, because it doesn't motivate people like me to invent cool stuff, in fact it demotivates - because I'm not motivated by the idea of getting sued (and losing) for being too clever.
And I'm not motivated by the creation of big businesses, or pouring my heart into creating for one. That's not what I want to do. It's not the world I want to create for our children, having seen the consequence of a big business dominated world to date. And there are lots of creative, technically proficient people of a similar mind.
There's nothing unreasonable about fair competition, when the results are good. This is not fair competition, though, and the results are not good: this is the long arm of patent law acting in the interest of big business at the expense of small business and individuals, and at the expense of spirited individual invention.
It's natural and traditional for established big businesses to fight and get their way. It's good that they do: not all that is created in that way is bad. But that doesn't make it ok for the law to strongly penalise spirited independent inventors. That's not good for anyone, really.
-- Jamie
Because pr0n would be illegal, you insensitive clod.
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
Though fundamentally different from patents, the EUCD is another broad reaching directive that consistently hurts EU consumers' basic rights... I have (very) recently started a site at anti-eucd.org to rally support against it.
Our protesting does absolutely nothing to sway them.
Absolute nonsense. Over the past few years, we've been protesting and lobbying and last September the European Parliament put through a decent piece of legislation that did exactly what we asked for.
Not it's the European Commission and the European Council who are causing trouble, after lobbying from industry (Nokia in particular), but so long as we keep the Parliament convinced, we're OK.
So no, every EU citizen reading this should lobby their MEPs immediately, because they do care.
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.
Why stone tablets? The law of the jungle is older, and much simpler: If you can't eat me, I'll eat you.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Direct democracy can work, we've proven that already. I bet you've never in your entire life just went to a politician, knocked on the door and asked him whether you could talk to him about an issue that bothers you. It may sound like an insane thing to do, but it works. Really. Especially if guys fly from Greece to Brussels and start talking to a Greek MEP in Greek. Those people didn't know what hit them.
It's pessimists like you that say that you can't change anything who make sure it is that way. It's a vicious circle. Obviously, you're not going to win every time (e.g., we lost the IPR enforcement directive). But you're making sure the other side doesn't either, so you are making a difference.
Donate free food here
it would be expensive. If it were to be done at a scale to have any sort of significance whatsoever, then very, expensive. Which is one of the big problems with software patents in the first place: you have to pay fees which for an individual or small company are nearly insurmountable, and at the same time not even pocket change for large corporations. And then there's paying the lawyers to actually have it enforced.
Work is punishment for failing to procrastinate effectively.
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.
True,a country cannot export a product to eg. the USA if the product infinges IP, but what about all the tools equipment and everything else that went into it's manufacture?
The western roman empire destroyed itself. True, germanic barbarians overtook rome, but not by some mighty battle, they just strolled into a city that had forgotton the basics, such as how to defend itself. The rest of the empire had even forgotton how to administrate itself.
Nowdays the western economic empire has given up on making wealth by producing things, and likes to make a living by owning the rights to produce things. The western empire will slowly but surely forget how to produce things, and then find that new things are being produced elsewhere using technology they don't own.
In the long term who is going to innovate, the people who are producing today or the people spinning as much money as possible out of what they produced yesterday?
And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)
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.
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.
So please tell me why software can be protected by all three IP mechanisms *st the same time*!!!
1) Trade sevret - you don't get to see the code
2) Copyright - the code you don't see cannot be copied, the object code *which has no expressive content* cannot be copied
3) Patents. Give the above two, you don't see what the patent means in actual terms, so it has to be interpreted by a solicitor as to what *they* think will hold up in court.
Patents alst way too long and don't currently need a practical result. Ergo, they are useless for software.
Tell me, would you be fine with BT getting royalties for using hyperlinks?