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NewsForge On U.S. Advice To EU On Software Patents
An anonymous reader points to Roblimo's "interesting article about how the U.S. sold out to software patents and the EU should as well." Should be of interest to Europeans, forced as they are "to suffer from willy-nilly software development by individuals who have not been screened, approved, and trained by corporate human resources professionals."
We have the elections for the European parliament coming up this weekend..
Are there any slashdotters here that let their vote be influenced by this, and if so how ?
It's a shame to see that this is almost definitely going to happen. With the abundance of bogus patents already granted in the US, it's only a matter of time before people start seeing obvious and old ideas being patented by corporations that exist solely to sue others into submission and profit from the legal entanglements while the lawyers are busy sorting everything out. I can't believe that Europeans would be so dumb as to bring this upon themselves, and can only conclude that the US is strongly pressuring them to come around to their point of view vis-a-vis intellectual "property".
Who's in the US pressuring Europe into this, why are they doing this, and how can we stop them?
Don't forget that already over 30000 (unofficial and not enforcable) software patents granted in the EU. Just imagine those poor corporations. They spent a lot of money on researching and filing out-of-law patents, all for nothing! Any sensible politician would say yes for the software patents I guess.
And that is to get the government and private industry so hooked on open source software that software patents would wreck the economy. The fastest way for the public to begin to realize that this is a terrible legal system is to make it hit home.
But then open source developers often just don't get it either. OpenOffice for example doesn't even have a word count feature nor the ability to print multiple slides on the same page. These are two features that are absolutely critical in an academic environment for students. With academia firmly against proprietary software giants, we can use universities as a weapon against them.
We really need for a group like Knoppix to make a LiveCD with the ability to do a very clean, intelligent install to the hard drive. LiveCDs are the way to go for installations. The user can play around with them all they want and then ideally, just run an installer to copy it to the hard drive and configure the bootloader.
Right now we have about 1.5-2 years before the next version of Windows comes out. Now is the time for the major projects to conduct user surveys to find out what is missing, add the features and get the product out the door. The fastest way to take down Microsoft, the biggest threat on patents, is to make them stop growing their profits. Since the company makes a lot of its payments from stock, if we can stop them from growing, maybe even cause them to actually have slight negative growth, it would unbalance their payment system which would cause them to have to burn through more cash.
And as an aside, ironically to those who are thinking G-ddamn he is a socialist.... I'm voting libertarian in 2004.
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Your point is good, but unfortunately the broadness of most software patents means that if there is an OSS 'alternative' to a proprietary program, it will probably infringe on that patent and risk being crushed by a team of elite ninja lawyers.
I designed one of the problem sets (homework assignments) for the intro CS course at Princeton University. The assignment is a digital signal processing one where you animate waveforms from an mp3, generate your own sound waves, and add a basic filter to a sound wave. All the sound stuff including decoding the mp3 file is done for you, you just have to manipulate the data. The assignment was intended to teach the use of objects in Java (we had students create a Wave class that had some built in capabilities to add two sound waves together, amplify/attenuate sound waves, and generate waves of a given amplitude frequency - musical notes are characterized by their frequency), and make them deal w/ arrays. FYI, here is the assignment. N.B: I'm sure I screwed up some technical sound details in there
Point of the post: I got responses ranging from I hate it to this assignment made me want to be a CS major. The people who were interested in CS/math/sciences loved it because they got to do something fun fairly simply. Those who were taking the course to fulfill a requirement or to dabble in programming hated it because it required them to deal w/ creating their own class and some math (fill an array with samples of a sin wave) and other stuff that required some thought/learning. They much preferred the assignments I hated that involved no creativity/original thought and were rather boilerplate. A lot of people (even really smart people) don't like being forced to think and much prefer memorization to critical thinking/problem solving. That's why, IMHO, many programs don't teach concepts (it disgusts me that in engineering classes the profs are "afraid" to give mathematical proofs for things b/c so many students hate them) or foundation - because too many people hate it and shy away from courses that focus on things that can't be crammed for and require understanding.
that there is a firm and long-term strategy in place by certain groups to find ways of outlawing the act of writing code for public consumption without a license. the end goal being simply to create or perpetuate existing monopolies by the creation of artificial barriers to entry into what has become an incredibly open market.
i think the first real attempt (or mockup) was certification of code which found its extreme in palladium. This principally technical solution has since been abandoned.
the current wave is based around so-called intellectual property rights. the term is a joke, but has many proponents, from the media industries through to the software business. you do not own that idea, it belongs to someone already. the space in your head has a 75-year lease.
this will also fail imho. it is - like palladium - too ludicrous a proposition and fails the basic darwin test: any society that allows its common technological culture to be partitioned into 'property' will suffer competitive disadvantage and eventually either change or die.
i expect the next phases to be based on security, but only after the current market leader is long dead and gone, its laughably insecure products being replaced with "professional" ones from other, older players.
who will, i think, be in the fore-front of the lobby to license software programming.
i've been programming for 20 years but i am very sure that my children will not be allowed to do this freely, any more than i can distill liquor and sell it to my neighbours.
software is just too fundamental, too valuable to be left in the hands of the common people.
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Right now, they're trying to justify patents in the EU because of the great economic prosperity in the US. Unfortunately, it's not the first time those in the US has used this kind of argument...
To paraphrase "look at the great wealth and prosperity of the plantation system, the grand architecture, the vast and rich land, the free markets ... they paid for those slaves God blessed, surely that alone shows slavery is good, and the negros have been saved from their barbaric condition" ....
I wish I could say that patents are causing less harm, but when they recently lokcked out 10's of millions of Africans dying of AIDS from getting generics because "they had no incentive", because patents are "a property right", becasue "the wealth of the pharmasutical industry in the US is proof that patents work" ... etc. - it really causes me to think twice.
The people who know understand that the USA works because of freedom that exists inspite of patents, not becaus of them.