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.
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/
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
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
Completely false.
That may have been how patents used to work, but it isn't anymore. The way patents work nowadays is a large company hires a 'research' department, locks them away in a basement and tells them basically: 'patent every single thing you can come up with'. The company does this to build up a patent portfolio which it then uses as munitions for legal wars. That is all. Software development is left to the big guys.
What's more, there are so many patents over software and they will soon be so fiercely defended that it means little guys won't have a chance at all, regardless of whether they want to release it for free or make a buck. You see, the sheer volume of broad patents means it is impossible to know if your small program is violating anything unless you have a massive legal deapartment going through everything for you. Hence, software development is left to the big guys.
And if software patents are supposed to protect the little guy's ideas, can you think of a single recent case where this has happened? A little guy has patented a software idea that has gone on to become very successful and not trampled by large corps? I can't either. If your argument were true we'd have loads of these small companies with patented ideas being very successful.
To further make my point, we also have large companies trading patents. This is not good. The 'innovator' as you like to call them is no longer the person making money off the patent and it allows large companies to buy up large scary portfolios to push other people out of the market. Let's take Microsoft. Recently they bought up a load of OpenGL patents from SGI. This is not good. Microsoft are a company who are trying to push their own 'technology' (Direct3D) over OpenGL. We are near to a position here where OpenGL could have a stop called to it by Microsoft because it owns vital patents.
At one point in the SCO / BayStar / Microsoft / Novell fiacso we (allegedly) had a situation where Microsoft were close to acquiring vital patents over Unix. Can you imagine what would happen if one company held patents over the two dominant operating system technologies? Even though this didn't happen this time, there's nothing to stop it happening in the future. All it would take is a buyout of Novell or Sun for example.
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.
Why should I care? This is irrelevant. $1b Doesn't even make a dent in Microsoft's finances. It makes no difference. Neither of these two are by any stretch of the imagination a 'little guy'. You think I should be on the side of Sun here just because they're fighting Microsoft? If it were something over antitrust I mgiht be interested, but as it is, it's just two dinosaurs hurling patent portfolios* at each other. It's only lawyers who win here.
* - Patents that have by now been totally seperated from their original 'innovation'.
Malike Bamiyi wanted my assistance.
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.
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.
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