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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.
I just hate it when they're approved for dual purpose. A software patent shouldn't cover basic ideas of commerce or advancements in technology as a whole.
Like google slipping in contextual advertising patents - by a "software" patent - thus working towards being the defacto monopoly because the software patent basically patents the idea of the advertising method thus stemming competition and not protecting any specific technology or research or ideas.
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.
Politicans fuck over the electorate. Film at 11.
Beep beep.
I seen many websites go on strike in the past (ex: Gnome, AMSN...). But these sites are only visited by the few linux users there are (few compared to windows users). These protests would make a bigger impact if they were done by sites that many people use, like google.
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
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!!!!!....
No this is not a software patent, you have improved the process of making steel but the process in the way you have implemented it requires the use of a computer to control it. The physical process of making steel is different and patent that. I mean by this is not a software issue, the patent for this should cover the same process being implemented for everything from something like a analogue electromechanical system to someone doing this level of control manually.
Very recently two new sponsors for the irish precidency appeared, as can be see on their sponsors web page. These are Microsoft and Dell. Is this just a coincidence?
This was already voted down for the people we elected. This is unelected people saying it doesn't matter, what the elected said where changing it back.
The Irish Polticians have a cozy setup with MS.
If a first you don't succeed, your a programmer...
For your information - the "disrespect for democracy" comment refers to the fact that the European Parliament voted against this legislation, but it is being brought in anyway. It's not saying that software patents are inherently anti-democratic.
You are aware that when IP was implemented that the publishing industry went nuts at the thought of the authors retaining any rights at all to their work. I can't find any explaination as to what REALLY happened when there were no IP laws. All I saw was wild generalizations about "chaos" and "mayhem". For who? Was there rioting in the streets? Did all the farmers go on strike and cause widespread starvation? All you damn IP people want to keep the gravy train running, and I say, Get paid for your performance. I told another guy that if you want IP, then I want royalties for every mile you drive your car after I fix it. Then I can sit back and "collect the rent" just like you. If you wany IP treated like real property, then you should pay property tax like you do on real property.
What?
I'm supposed to write software in a world where software can be patented?
Then every piece of code anyone writes is a ticking patent time-bomb.
So lets pretend we can have a patent office thoroughly staffed with geniuses gifted with eidetic memories and a sublime sense of of what is original and patent-worthy.
I'm supposed to read the entire patent database (hundreds of thousands of records)? And then once I finish that I only have to keep current with new grants (let alone new applications) - that's probably only dozens or hundreds a day...
Yeah, right. But then if someone comes along and wants a ransom for their patent on dereferencing pointers on Tuesdays or whatever seemed original and innovative 18 months ago, I'll either have to pay up or spend a few million to take on the fight in civil court...
I'm sorry - software patents are ridiculous. Your steel mill will invest in R&D to lower its energy costs, or it won't. But software patents don't create an incentive to do anything other than run for the hills. It's legitimizing barratry - the only winners are the lawyers, for the steel mill, the companies the steel mill sues, and for the other companies that will sue the steel mill for violating their patents, and so on and so forth, forever and ever...
Software patents are thought of by their proponents as a weapon against free software, and a cudgel against less wealthy competitors. And if they accrue enough legitimacy, within our lifetimes the software engineering discipline will be so clogged with them that practically no one can write software except in secret, no matter well you think the patent office can run. It's sadly ironic, really, that you think they spur any kind of innovation, when all they do is insure that no two good ideas are ever likely to be used together without a legal negotiation first...
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Read how you can help here...
http://swpat.ffii.org/group/todo/index.en.html
Sign a petition here...
http://petition.eurolinux.org/index_html?LANG=en
When I signed the number of signatures was 322888, A MILLION ARE NEEDED!!!!
Best Regards,
#322889
NetNewsWire into Yojimbo!
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
Maybe because authors didn't have their own press like they do now. The whole issue never came up before Gutenburg. And after that, it became an issue of who had the right to print to protect gov't and the publishing industry (more like the writer's guild at the time) The U.S. didn't care much about enforcing IP until it had acquired a significant amount of its own. The pirates and "criminals" of yesterday's societies are what gave us today's freedoms. And today's pirates will do the same for future societies. It appears that if you want freedom, you need the "criminals" to make the law unenforcable. When I create something, I get paid then and there, as it should be. Then I forget about it and move on. By the way, the first copyright law came about in 1710. It's not all that diiferent from today's law (except for the time scales involved). Right now, copyright is being used to protect the publishing middle man more than anyone else. This is necessary to insure that creators will be dependant on them (requiring that they sign over their rights, etc,) forever if possible.
What?
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.
Addendum:
Imagine if after being treated by medical personel, you would have to pay them a portion of any money you made. If they hadn't saved you, there would be no means for your later productivity. Shouldn't you pay them royaltees? If not, why should this be done for "intellectual" property?
My understanding of what happend is something like:
- The patent office comes out with a wishlist.
- The EU Parliment votes it down and puts some strict limits on software patents.
- The Parliment vote is passed to some bureaucrats to clean up and make into 'proper' laws (it's now out of the Parliament's hands).
- The bureaucrats rip out all of the changes made by parliament, and add a few options that weren't even in there to begin with.
- The president -- currently held by Ireland -- (and literally sponsored by Microsoft) manages to get his EU Council of Ministers to accept this bureaucrat-mangled edit.
Voila! democracy subverted!Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Because of open source software nature, people can look at how (algorithms). Closed source, no idea how they implimented it. I wonder when linux is going to get hit with a patent lawsuit that makes the SCO look a nice sunny day.
Most software is made up of very small components put together to create functionality. (loops/ branches| arrays, queues, trees) Its very hard to define something as patentable because by its nature everything in software can be broken down into something that isn't new.
I would have thought little companies would have iritated the big boys (microsoft / apple) to force the governments hand to stop this mess (since companies tend to have the ear of our fine electorate). It really stiffles inovation.
Are you sure you aren't a little bit backwards there? The USPTO was only killing American business. All the EU is doing is making sure that America wont be alone in the technological dark ages when the rest of the world has surpassed them technically.
Hi,
This is already patentatble in Europe, and there is little problem with that. The effect of the program on the process of making steel ensures this. IAPA (I am a patent attorney).
To flourish, we need free use of standards, so everyone can build a better Word. Software patents would be bad for the economy. Plus, it may take a page to write down an algorithm, but to get a somewhat bug-free program, it will take almost as long as the original developers. So, the patent wouldn't give that much help. If there are software patents, the source code should be included. That will be somewhat of a counter force.
Yours,
Bert
A list of representatives can be found here.
I did. I even got some replies!
The worst aspect of all of this is that the European Parliament voted for significant amendments last fall (effectively banning software patents). Following the vote the proposal was simply retracted and the *original* version is now presented to the European Council, thereby mucking the entire democratic process.
I also wrote to magazines and newspapers, trying to bring their attention to that issue.
I'm also contemplating filing an official complaint with the EU (not because of software patents, but because of the undemocratic way the directive was handled in this inctance). The EU has the *legal* obligation to investigate official complaints.
Although there may be frustration, it's not time to give up, yet.
It is long not over, people.
On 17-18th of May, there will be a real vote by the Council of Ministers. If they vote against software patents - we win.
If Council of Ministers votes for software patents then the bill will return to european Parlament for a re-discussion, which will be postproned to September due to elections.
There we will have the chance to discuss this again, this time with a new European Parlament.
Note: the previose EPclearly stated AGAINST software patents.
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.
US Company : Let's patent this in the U.S., so that nobody else operating here can use it without licensing. ... oh, drat, we can't.
:D
:D
EU Company : Let's patent this in the E.U.
US Company : Let's expand to the E.U.
US Company : Oh hot diggity-dang! Will you look at that! Nobody here patented it, 'cos they can't, we won't have any trouble competing on a 'level' playing field!
EU Company ; Let's expand to the U.S.
EU Company : Aww shite. Wtf? We have to license this if we want to operate in the U.S. ?
EU Company : Eh.. wtf ? Some US Company just started business here, and is using our ideas that we couldn't patent!
US Company : Haha. Silly Europeans - either they pony up for a license, or they just don't get to enter the U.S. market. Win/win for us!
So yeah, that's basically what he's smoking.
There's finer nuances to this, but that's the gist of it.
It is to me, though. And I'm not alone in this.
The EU is not fundamentally a bad thing. The close cooperation between european states has allowed me, at least, to grow up in a Europe where war is unthinkable for the first time in - well, forever, basically. All these processes you hear about, like that single coin, bring our countries closer together and join them more and more in a unified whole. And that is good. But occasionally we get excesses, such as in this case, and that's something we must fight.
Interesting enough today the old dutch politician Bolkestein returned back to dutch national politics. He has spent several years in brussels and suddenly has aborted his job there. Now why would he return so swiftly all of a sudden?
Bolkestein didn't "abort" his job. He merely announced that he doesn't want a second term as European Commissioner. He will stay on until the end of the current term on November 1st. Hardly a "swift" return.
Denmark was one of the countries that showed some resistance to the
Irish proposal. Now, three weeks ago, most people in the Danish
government and ministries seemed unaware of the negative impacts of
software patents on interoperability. However, an effort by many to
educate the legislators seems to have helped.
That said, as a leaked(?) document
with the current proposed patent directive shows, Denmark
unfortunately has proposed RAND licensing for interoperability-related
patents (see the footnotes on page 10.)
We Danes will need to work on fixing that mistake. Hopefully other
Europeans will try to get their government to change their vote.
According to FFII, only ONE country needs to change its mind to shift
the balance of power in the EU council!
"Firstly, the EU directive just _harmonises existing case law_ - without the directive, what's going to happen is that different EU states are going to take different approaches and thus it will be a nightmare."
....It doesn't seem as though Linux, OpenOffice, mysql and numerous other open source products have been affected anything more than trivially."
No the European patent office started allowing software patents, this gives a legal basis for those patents.
"Secondly, the EU directive _actually reduces the degree of software patentability"
The Parliaments suggestions were valid and carefully thought through.
I've read ffii's comment's and they are valid too, the Commissions wording is full of holes.
If Pariament & People's comments didn't have validity then why seek to prevent those comments being expressed? Why not just argue your case to EU Parliament?
"Thirdly, it's been stated over and over again that there are 'multiple software business models' at work in Europe, and there's no specific reason to favour closed model approaches to open model approaches: they all work, and provide revenue and so on."
So? What has that to do with anything, the risk is that a monopoly player will be able to lock out competitors, the Parliament proposed a solution to this, the Commission didn't.
Whether that competition comes from closed or open source is irrelevant.
"Fourthly, in terms of 'software patents blocking open source',
Your comment pre-supposes that the directive represents the status quo and it certainly doesn't.
This *changes* the law, if it didn't there wouldn't be any point in having it! So whether patents *currently* affect MySql etc. or not is irrelevant.
"Fifthly, the EU always maintains more stricter examination than the US: business methods per se are _not_ patentable in the EU, and equally, flakey software patents have a harder time getting through. Stop transposing the failures of US into the EU."
Good, but the wording proposed by the Commission is fluffy. For example FFII comments on the "technology" issue are correct.
The Commissions wording does allow patents whose technology part is simply that they execute on a computer. Parliament's wording is tighter meaning that the invention has to represent improved technology.
Since any business process can be run on a computer, it allows business process patents simply by virtue of sloppy wording.
Parliament did a good job.
"Finally, the protests in Brussels are are a laugh: against multimillion dollar turnover businesses using patents and contributing to the wellbeing of the EU economy"
It's not in the interests of the European economy to allow a few patent holders to lock themselves into the their markets. Even if that patent holder is Nokia.
Being pro-competition isn't the same as being anti-business.
Secondly, the EU directive _actually reduces the degree of software patentability_, because currently after IBM, claims to "programs on a carrier" are allowed, but the directive removes the ability to claim this.
No, article 5.2 of the new Council draft overturns the parliament text, and explicitly permits program claims.
Fifthly, the EU always maintains more stricter examination than the US: business methods per se are _not_ patentable in the EU, and equally, flakey software patents have a harder time getting through. Stop transposing the failures of US into the EU.
Patents directed at improving methods of doing business have previously been disallowed by UK case law. This will be overturned by the directive, which will bring the UK into line with EPO practice, allowing patents for improved business methods which contain a "technical contribution".
The EPO's standards of what constitutes a "technical contribution" can be judged from the Amazon gift-ordering patent, where a patent was granted on the process of:
1. X choosing a gift from Amazon to send to Y
2. Amazon asking Y where to send the gift to
3. Amazon sending the gift
This apparently is a "technical contribution" to the state of the art, and therefore patentable.
Finally, the protests in Brussels are are a laugh: against multimillion dollar turnover businesses using patents and contributing to the wellbeing of the EU economy, you have a bunch of jokers with "terrorism is corporate suicide" and other fairly poor and non-objective slogans doing pantomines. Unless the arguments show facts and figures, and more substantive evidence, this is entirely dismissable.
Actually, as a photo-opportunity it was quite successful. And as a chance to get people concerned about software patents together in a festive environment, it was very successful.
But you may be interested to know that it was followed by a four hour conference, attended by leading MEPs and addressed by leading economists, with representatives from the Commission and the EPO also on the panels.
If you're a subscriber to LWN, there's a report about the gathering by Tom Chance on the latest weekly front page. If you're not a subscriber, the page becomes freely available next Thursday.
(more points to follow)