Second Round of EU Patent Fight, Coming Up

An anonymous reader writes "Seems that last fall's victory over EU patent regulations was just round one. The current draft rejects all clarifying amendments made by the European Parliament, allowing direct patentability of computer programs. A net-wide protest is being organized on April 14."

Comments

I don't understand Nokia

[mindless4210]

From this link:

Nokia's Patent Department is collecting signatures from CTOs for this letter in support the "working document" of the EU Council "Working Party on Intellectual Property", a group of patent administrators who run the European Patent Office. The letter portrays this document as a "balanced compromise" which "takes the Parliament's concerns into account" and says that this is needed in order to assure that electric household applicances, medical technology etc do not become unpatentable. Thereby the letter drafters deceive both their signatories (CTOs who usually do not read the directive proposals) as well as their readers.

It disturbs me to see Nokia taking taking the role that they have been. Their statements seem to be quite misleading, and it is clear that they will have significant gain from software patents. With all the heat they've been getting lately, you would think that they might try to take it easy on such controversial issues. Either way, I am fully against software patents.

As has been said before.

[Tsian]

If you would really like to promote change, please take the time to write or call officials. This will almost certainly have a larger impact than any protest restricted to the net.

I mean, obviously these people do not get technology in the way most of us do, otherwise they would not be suggesting such ludicrous laws. As such, take the battle to them on terms they understand.

Re:As has been said before.

[flossie]

If you would really like to promote change, please take the time to write or call officials.

e-mail works fine. Most of the ones I write to (we have 8 Scottish MEPs) are generally happy to receive and reply to e-mails.

Re:As has been said before.

[Tsian]

Oh, I think most will now respond to and read e-mail. However, I still think there is a large psychological difference between a full inbox and a large crate of letters.

I would argue that the letters (or large amount of calls) seem more 'real' as they take up quantifiable amounts of time and space.

The one good thing

[The_Mystic_For_Real]

The one good thing about this is that now the US won't fall behind Europe in the software field.

moo

[sleepnmojo]

If the sites don't go down in protest, we'll slashdot them

Protest in your living room.

[normal_guy]

A net-wide protest is being organized on April 14.

And we know that influential lawmakers frequent Slashdot, Fark, Plastic, and Sourceforge.

Letter Template Explaining it all to Lawmakers

[Anonymous Coward]

Some interesting parts from a letter you can send to people, hopefully law makers who can make a difference:

http://slashdot.org/~Sanity/journal/60471

--

Patents are well suited to fields where new innovations require years of research and large amounts of capital, however this is not the case with software. Every new innovation in software builds on a multitude of previous innovations, and even a single software engineer might solve hundreds of small problems in a single day of programming. Against this backdrop, the notion of the programmer seeking a 20 year patent on each of those small solutions is clearly ridiculous.

Worse still, imagine now that this programmer is forced to ensure that every small innovation they might want to build upon is not covered by someone else's patent. The programmer might need to conduct hundreds of patent searches in a single day of programming, and even then they would have no guarantee that they aren't violating a patent! Clearly this situation would be ridiculous, yet this is exactly the situation that programmers in the US and Japan now find themselves, and is exactly the situation that current UK government policy will impose on European Software developers!

Even large companies are not invulnerable to such parasitic practices. In the US, Microsoft is currently fighting against a small company called Eolas who have acquired a patent on an obvious technique fundamental to the operation of any web browser. This company, if successful, will be able to extort a tax on every company and individual in the United States that uses the Internet! It is worth noting that this company's only purpose is to generate revenue through extortion using this patent, they have never written a line of computer code, nor do they have any intention of doing so.

Nokia vs. Opera

[The Angry Mick]

Nokia's position is a bit on the extreme side, which makes it all the more curious since most of the stuff they use is being written by Opera. From the article:

"Nokia doesn't seem to be counting Opera among the European innovators", comments Håkon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software Inc, an innovation leader in the web browser market and producer of much of the software used in Nokia's mobile phones.

One almost gets the impression that Nokia may be looking to do a bit of "embracing and extending", and then relying on the slow pace of the courts to kill off competition?

Re:Software patents are good.. in general

[Zocalo]

Except for a few videogames, Europe isn't exactly the hotbed of new software technology.

Oh, it's not as bad as that. Quite a lot of R&D for software happens in Europe - a lot of Microsoft's UI research is done in Cambridge (England, not Mass.) for example, KDE has a European origin, and Linux itself is from Finland. And there is the small matter of CERN inventing HTTP, the web browser and all... So, technically, for all those people who think that the WWW *is* the Internet, it was actually invented in Europe. ;)