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."
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.
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 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.
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.