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EU Moves Toward Software Patents
edooper writes "Apparently the patent discussion in Europe has taken a turn for the worse. According to the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure: 'This Wednesday, the Irish Presidency managed to secure a qualified majority for a counter-proposal to the software patents directive, with only a few countries - including Belgium and Germany - showing resistance. This proposal discards all limiting amendments from the European Parliament and reinstates the laxist provisions from the Commission, adding direct patentability of data structures and process descriptions as icing on the cake. In a remarkable sign of unity in times of imminent elections, members of the European Parliament from all political groups are condemning this blatant disrespect for democracy in Europe.' Read more: swpat.ffii.org."
How can any company possibly function, let alone open source when almost everything will be patented after this? The EU does not seem to know much about the decisions it makes...
WASTE - The Secure P2P
I may be just dim-witted, but it seems like governments are having too difficult a time understanding just how counter-productive this could/would be. I mean, sure, it sounds like it would improve your economy at first glance to discourage free software, but if Europe is running on free software and America's pockets are being drained by commercial software, whose economy benefits in the long run?
- Allen Pike
Altering time, one time at a time.
If data structures are patentable does this make it possible to prevent interoperability?
Apparently Microsoft has realized that copyright is not nearly as powerful as patents for clobbering open source. This sounds disasterous.
According to the background information:
"The Irish Presidency explains on its website that it is sponsored by Microsoft. Ireland is "the largest software-exporting country in Europe", thanks to a fiscal policy which makes it a tax haven for large US companies: it has a tax rate on patent revenues of 0%."
So it would appear that US corporations are subverting international processes for their own benefit. This is exactly the same as the Australia-US situation, where compliance with draconian US IP laws HAVE BEEN MADE A CONDITION of the US entering into a Free Trade Agreement.
I'm struggling to cope with this though: the Irish stuff up IP laws in EU - but they make Guinness...Don't make me choose!!!!!....
Will all the old patents from the past 50 years in the US suddenly be patented?
... then just maybe. If the patent is truly deserving.
Will us European programmers suddenly need a license to implement quicksort and all of those other software patents that expired so long ago?
If so, the European software industry is fucked. Truly and royally fucked. It will kill it totally. There won't be one. Implementing software patents allowing this would be 100% counter-productive.
Now if the law is only for new applications, not for ones already existing
Why don't I believe that this will be the case. It'll just be a whole load of obvious patents for software and methods that have been done a thousand times before, albeit in a slightly different context - which somehow makes the new patent valid!
This is just another law to get a load of lawyers a load of money for submitting patents, whilst fucking over everybody else.
Fucking sickening.
Yeah, well before you start you xenophobic EU-bashing, remember that if it wasn't for the USPTO's stance of letting people patent everything and the kitchen sink then the EU legislators wouldn't have taken such a step.
In the real world, where companies and countries have to compete against one another in business, not recognising software patents in the EU whilst they are being handed out like hot cakes in the US is the quickest way to destroy software development within the EU. I don't like it - in fact, I hate it - but those are the reasons behind it.
So, before you start EU-bashing, on software patents and rights in general (perhaps you should check out the EU Human Rights Act as well) perhaps you should learn to appreciate that it's only following the rather poor precedent set by the US.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
No, that's not about patents at all. The things stopping you from running straight to the competitor and selling them all your ideas are contracts and trade secret laws, not patents.
Patents are not there to give the inventor a monopoly on what they invent. If that were the case, patents wouldn't bother with expiry dates. The original principle of patents was to give small inventors an opportunity to sell their invention - that is, if someone comes up with a brilliant new widget a large company could get his invention to market much quicker than the inventor can. The inventor can't hide their invention away - they have to go out and advertise it to venture capitalists and potential backers so that they can raise funds to bring it to market. A patent was there to let the inventor publish their invention and have a monopoly on it long enough to get to market and become established.
That's certainly not the way patents work these days - especially with the various extensions, and other cunning techniques (constantly revising a patent to keep it in the works for as long as possible) used to extend the length of patents. Furthermore, with business method and software patents you can now patent general broad ideas and algorithms of how to do things. Once things get that broad there are problems.
In the current world of patents R&D is discouraged, not encouraged. Why should a smaller steel mill put in any research into anything? Odds are the larger steel mill with the larger amount of cash to throw into R&D and patents will manage to patent (through broad patents) pretty much anything you might happen to invent. All they have to do is keep a vague eye on your R&D department then crash research and patent anything you're workign on. To spend 4 years on research only to find the larger mill has just patented something sufficently close to your idea to block it - well, that's a waste of money. You're better off not bothering and just licensing whatever new stuff the bigger mill comes up with.
The real question you should be asking is "Why should a steel mill invest in R&D?". The answer is, because they can make better products more efficiently if they do. That should be reason and incentive enough.
Jedidiah.
Craft Beer Programming T-shirts
They will not *sue* end users, they will go after developers. Patents ensure that Windows will remain the defecto OS for at least out lifetimes. In computer terms, an eternity.
Personally, I would at least hope they would allow math patents. Afterall, most software patents are just ideas stolen from the math world. Too bad "law" makers are too stupid to realize this.
Physical inventions require physical resources, thus practical costs.
Discovering an formula, which is what all algorithms boil down to, requires mental resources. How do you put a price on thought?
Thought has never been as overvalued as it is right now. If people don't come back to understanding real costs, things will get paid worse.
A programmer shuold not be paid more than a paramedic. Saving a life should be worth more. This is just one example where the system is askew. I maintain it is because of an overvaluing of thought and an undervaluing of action/physical.
Being smart is not everything. Acting, doing is.
The ultimate manifestation of this is the lawsuit company, what Baystar wants SCO to become. No practical output, just patents based on some kind of mental labour that has been overvalued.
Software is math. Math is not patentable.
OR
Software is literature. Literature is not patentable.
To protect your ideas, a simple copyright is enough. You do not need patents in software field.