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Dutch Parliament Reverses Software Patent Vote
Sanity writes "On May 18th, by a thin majority, the European Council of Ministers voted in favor of throwing out the European Parliament's efforts to keep software patents out of Europe. According to an FFII press release, the Dutch Parliament yesterday voted to change its Minister's vote, which was in favor, to an abstension. This is an unprecidented move and a great coup for those fighting against software patents, never before has a country reversed a vote in this manner. While this is not sufficient to reverse the decision of the Council of Ministers, it does pave the way for other countries, many of which were pressured into an affirmative vote, to do the same. Now is the time for citizens of the EU to put pressure on their national governments to follow the Dutch lead."
It's a small step on it's own, but that's really good news :) Hopefully some of the countries who were unsure about it but ultimately pressured into agreement will now start to think twice about their choices, and maybe refuse to accept the motion, or abstain, removing the majority that the motion otherwise has.
It'd be better if they had outright voted no, but an abstention is still better than a vote in favour.
If you can change your vote after you see a reaction to it from your financial backers, how is it a vote anymore?
Vote:
1. A formal expression of preference for a candidate for office or for a proposed resolution of an issue.
2. A means by which such a preference is made known, such as a raised hand or a marked ballot.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
Hopefully more countries will follow the Dutch lead, and loosen the grasp of proprietary software in Europe, leading to more competition in the market, and ultimately Microsoft's downfall *evil grin*
If they had changed their vote to a negative instead of just abstaining then it might have some influence, but the Dutch chose to act as if their man wasn't at the vote.
This won't make any difference the UK vote on patents although the Eurosceptics might enjoy the idea of putting a spanner in the works of the commision on other issues.
Topic of this vote aside how is Europe supposed to get anywhere if a country votes one way and then a couple of months later changes its decision? They had time enough to make up their minds. Decisons this will only undermine political credibility in Europe.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
Please learn from our mistakes. Don't let stealth legislation ramrod you into 1984. It starts with patents and ends with your freedom. Don't let this opportunity slip by.
If you're a democracy, then you're a constituent, and your opinion matters, as long as it's heard. E-mail works good, but snail mail works better. Better than all of that, however, is a phone call.
If we survive long enough to make the floating cities and flying cars a reality, it will be because inventors, software developers and corporations were open-minded and generous enough to give away their inventions/creations for the benefit of everybody, albeit in exchange of a reasonable amount of compensation, but above all the satisfaction of having done something good for the betterment of others.
The current trend seems to be headed in a completely opposite direction - profit (hate that word now) seems to be the only motivating factor (if not for individuals, atleast for the corporations binding creative humans by heavy handed employment contracts/etc) for any development we're seeing at all.
It's about time we got over this short-sightedness and moved towards a society which is not encumbered by flimsy lawsuits, overstepping patents, profit mindedness, or constant fear of the former two. Information should be free.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
OK, so they're voting "yes" any more, but they're hardly fighting back. What help is an abstention? Surely what we really want are "no" votes? Maybe it was just too much to do a *complete* turnaround...
-- "There's no explaining the things that might happen; there's now a new home for technology in fashion."
"Most great inventions where created by large corporations that made all of that R&D possible."
What great inventions?
Steam engine? Nope, invented by a single man.
Internal combustion engine? Again, nope.
Penicillin? Not a corporation.
Radio? Again, no.
Corps only make inventions profitable.
"Somehow, I don't see a guy in his garage inventing the next breakthrough in microprocessor technology, or space flight, or medicine, then giving it away. That's a fairy tale."
Maybe not giving away, but my guess is that radically new technologies *are* invented in garages. Primarily because if you do R&D for a corporations, your boss expects you to find that lucrative new technology. So most things invented by corporations will be more or less gradual improvements of existing technology.
The guy with his garage is free to create totally new things, so he is more likely to come up with something radically new.
Then, after a while this new technology has to be improved, made more reliable, or cheaper, and that costs money. A lots of money. So then you would expect that only big corps are able to afford R&D.
But the radically new ideas? Expect the genius with his garage.
If I get a machine and use it to create a string of bits that then gets used as a set of instructions to tell other machines what to do, then I do get protection for coming up with that string of bits. It's called "copyright". You patent inventions, you copyright expressions of thought. If software running on a computer is a patentable process, then why not allow patents on a new song or movie or picture? It's a string of bits that makes machines do useful, novel, and nonobvious things, so why not patent it?
The issue I have with software patents isn't that patenting or IP is bad, it's that you have to separate IP into different categories for different situations. Or, if you don't want to do that, then be willing to take things to their logical conclusion and allow patents on music and movies and books and all other expressions of thought that happen to be recorded as strings of bits and happen to be used to make machines do things. When people allow patents on music and books and movies and such, I will support software patents. Because then the people who came up with this idea will prove to me that they get it.
Best. Comment. Ever. Enjoy!
Even if you think there is something between the idea and the implementation, some sort of 'middle' uniqueness that can be patented, a patent is completely useless at protected it!
Consider the Google pagerank patent, how can Google know if anyone other search engine is using pagerank?
Even if search engines released their binaries, it would be next to impossible to reverse engineer all the binaries and locate the equivalent to the 'page rank' system in it.
So any 'middle uniqueness' patents are worthless because infringements can't be detected.
Setting aside all the history of algorithms not being patentable, this is a basic problem with software patents.
That leaves patents on the idea itself, or patents on the implementation in code (which is already protected by copyrights, and trade secrets).
Then there's Spain. I find the phrase "undermine political credibility in Europe" to be a laughable concept when an entire country changes its majority party in a radical direction because of a single terrorist bombing.
Yeah. I always thought that the US reaction to 9/11 was such an impressive display of nuance, balance and wisdom.
It would be nice to be sure of anything the way some people are of everything.
In literature, the media to which copyright originally applied, an idea is worthless but it's expression is valuable. You can't patent the idea of a story about star-crossed lovers, but you can copyright your expression of it. This dichotomy is present in copyright law, and it applies to software as well. The investment in producing, say, a word processor isn't the idea of a word processor, it's the programmer-years of effort to required implement one, and that is exactly what copyright rewards.
By rewarding the idea instead of the implementation, patents hinder innovation. If you had patented the idea of a word processor, then with just few lawyer-weeks of non-productive labor, you would have precluded everyone else in the world from investing in the implementation of a word processor. To say nothing of having harmed the job market for programmers, you now totally control every word processor ever built, despite having done nothing! Now anyone who wants to write a word processor has to find you and pay you (if you even decide to license the patent), which will surely limit the number of word processors written. With central control and without diversity, innovation suffers. If I have an idea for a feature, but you don't like it, there's nowhere else I can go, and my innovation will be lost.
Patents also harm innovation by increasing the legal risk of writing software. Many people write software for fun or to scratch an itch. Many small companies write software for small profits in niche markets. This is a big source of innovation. These people and companies don't have the resources to search for patents they may unknowingly be infringing, the money to license them, or the lawyers to defend themselves if they don't. Writing software is fun, but getting sued isn't, and if writing software puts one at constant legal risk, it won't happen.
Finally, patents prevent computers from being compatible with each other and easy to use. You suggest that if IBM patents "nesting selectable options in a menu," then we should all come up with a better way. And suppose someone patented scroll-bars -- we should all put them on different sides, or use the scroll-wheel (if we've licenced it, that is), or scroll-buttons. But users would confuse scroll-buttons with close-bars ("scroll up, then down to close"), which were used instead of the "X in the top-right" to evade a Microsoft patent. My point is, copying ideas, such as scroll bars, menus, plugin APIs, etc. is absolutely necessary for software to work together and for computers to interface with users in a standard way. Copyrights respect this and allow companies to make profit anyway, but patents do not.
Some nitpicking first, as you seem pretty confusing (if not confused):
Software is a process, done physically by a machine.
really, now! Software is a set of instructions. What the GP meant is (I presume) that you can emulate the effect of executing those instructions on a cpu, in your head - very slowly indeed, but that's not the point.
Software and programming is not a feild of technology. It is a feild of mathematics.
This is a pure statement of your opinion, and many many many people would argue you (and win) wrong.
This is a big confusing point. In most industries, the 'research' part and the 'implementation' part are treated separately. The first one is science, the second is engineering. The software industry choses to blur the line between 'computer science' and 'software engineering' to serve their benefits. Thus, while coming up with, say, a better crypto algorithm, belongs to applied math, implementing it belongs to programming.
This leads to the main line of inquiry: which part of the software is being patented, the science one? the engineering one? both? The accepted rule was supposed to be that pure science does not get patented, as that would block scientific progress. This is quite blurred in applied science, which is what makes the debate open.
The other point about software patents is the dynamics of the software field. History showed several times that active fields become stagnant when burdened with long-term patents - a short-term patent system is better for the market, as it forces the inventor to move forward instead of encouraging the current 'patent pooling and litigating' business model.