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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 says that the vote of the Council of Ministers was on May 18th, but that the Dutch Parliament's vote to change their minister's vote was yesterday...so it is current news.
The news is that Holland is now maybe the first country EVER to change it's vote in this procedure.
Actually, we are from The Netherlands. And don't forget our tulips. And we lured Andrew S. Tanenbaum to our Vrije Universiteit.
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.
Please use this link instead, it goes to a static version of the linked page. It would be nice if an editor could update the story itself as well, thanks.
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This is a filthy, dirty vote play. Really, it is.
HOWEVER, it is totally justified.
If your competitor plays dirty and wins, consistently, the only way you can compete is to be just as dirty, if not more-so.
The upcoming USA election should be interesting.
So they were for being against opposing patents. This is your brain on drugs.
Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
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
Darn, I wanted to be the first one in Holland to patent the grouped task bar buttons.
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.
The Dutch parliament moved against (well, abstained) the vote against the motion against software patents in europe?
Oh that was clear.
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Microsoft has purchased the Netherlands and has patented throwing out software patents.
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."
Our dutch political groups were (alomst) all oposed to the law.
The person who was going to vote is the leading person of one of our political groups (that group was oposed to the new law even more than most others)
He decided to vote in favor if the proposal would be changed to be a much nicer law.
The proposal was changed to some extend, but not as far as what he descussed and promised to the rest of his group and the other groups.
He voted in favor of the law, and everyone was stunned!
Things started to rumble as his own party was starting to ask questions.
A dutch digital freedom organisation made a propsition to the different party's to change the vote.
The voter replied that he would not change his vote as that could be harmfull to his party and carreer.
And now all of sudden, probably after more talking and lobying he did change, (or someone else made him)
Wow... the Dutch Parliament reversed a European Council of Ministers vote that had been in favor of throwing out the European Parliament's efforts to keep software patents out of Europe.
In other news, my best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with a girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night.
The Netherlands never ceases to impress me with the decisions they make.
This vote shows that the Dutch rep to the EU Parliament defied the government, therefore the people, he "represents". While politicians are sent to lead the people, even when leadership is controversial or unpopular, Dutch minister Brinkhorst blamed his "maverick" vote on a typo. The Dutch, with their traditional prudence and deft style, have reversed the result, without even reversing their vote, by appropriately abstaining when their own vote was dysfunctional. Now the question is: who got to this weasel? Who paid him off? Could it be M$, adding his bribe to the big, yet acceptable, bill they're liable to pay the EU for running a foreign monopoly against their people? How much does it cost a corporation to rig property laws in their favor for decades in Europe? And for the politically ambitious European, does Brinkhorst get to keep his bribe, even though he botched the delivery?
--
make install -not war
The post is very confusing: he voted against the people that are against voting against being contrary to software patents, something like that...
What the heck, can someone simplify it?
how long until
I was at the previous committee meeting. All the MPs that were there were not happy with the minister and secretary, but the MP (Vendrik (sp?)) who proposed the motion came to the conclusion that a negative vote was unreachable. IMO primarily because of the CDA- and VVD-fractions, who were not happy with the way the EP-EC vote went, but only partially against software patents per se.
Ehm, the majority of the spanish people were against Spain sending troops to Iraq in the first place. (I believe they stated they would let the troops stay if the United Nations took political and military control).
The PSOE stated they would bring the troops home if they were elected. Maybe the bombing contributed to their victory, but AFAIR they were close in the polls even before the bombing. So it's not like the victory came out of thni air like you are implying.
Sounds like how democracy is supposed to work to me. The party that went against the majorities opinion got slapped on the wrist.
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.
I live in Spain, and I lived through those days of the bombing and elections shortly afterwards. I can tell you something with certainty -- the election went the way it did not because of the bombing, but because of the governing party's response to it. They tried to very crudely manipulate public opinion in the aftermath of the bombing so that the elections would go in their favour. The public was responding to the governments blatent attempt to manipulate them, not the bombing per se.
It's a real shame that it was presented in a lot of the American press differently, because Bush could learn a lot from the Spanish public's response to the governing party's attempted manipulation -- lie to the electorate, and they'll punish you for it.
Is there an official record of the proceedings of the Dutch Parliament, similar to the UK's Hansard, to which I can direct the attention of my MP? I'm not sure that a wiki page at the FFII website will carry sufficient authority to prompt her to try the same thing here.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
ahh... thank you, so much clearer now
do we love or hate the dutch right now? im still lost
TIAEAE!
Finaally, some saanity haas been restored to the paatent debaate. Congraatulaations to our Dutch friends for their couraageous step forwaard.
Exit, pursued by a bear.
sounds like the check bounced to the Dutch Parliament
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"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!
Not sure... but at least we know why they call it double dutch.
"Those who cast the votes decide nothing; those who count the votes decide everything." (attrib. Joseph Stalin)
Ah, thank you. You put me in mind to go and look up this:
Bernard Woolley: "Now, may I just have your approval for this Local Government Allowances Amendment Number 2 for this year's regulations."
Jim Hacker: "What is it?"
Bernard Woolley: "It is a Statutory Instrument to be laid before the House. As Minister responsible for local government we need you to authorize that the revised Paragraph 5 of Number 2 Regulations 1971 shall come into operation on March the 18th next, revoking Regulation 7 of the Local Government Allowances Amendment Regulations 1954(b)."
Jim Hacker: "What the hell does all that mean?"
Bernard Woolley: "It is all right, there is an explanatory note, Minister. These Regulations are to make provisions for prescribing the amount of attendance and financial loss allowances payable to the members of local authorities. Explanatory note: Regulation 3 of the Local Government Allowances Amendment Regulation 1971 ("the 1971 regulations") substituted a new regulation for Regulation 3 of the 1954 Regulations. Regulation 3 of the Local Government Allowances Amendment Regulation 1972 ("the 1972 regulations") further made amends Regulation 3 of the 1954 Regulations by increasing the maximum rates of attendance and financial loss allowances. Regulation 7 of the 1972 Regulations revoked both regulation 3 and 5 of the 1971 Regulations, Regulation 5 being a regulation revoking earlier spent regulations with the effect from 1st April next. These regulations preserve Regulations 2 and 5 of the 1971 Regulations by revoking Regulation 7 of the 1972 Regulations.
Jim Hacker: "And that's an explanatory note???"
From Yes, Minister (of course).
English-speaking people do.
Even if the patent is invalid, a law suit to get the patent invalidated costs between $US 1,500,000 and $US 2,000,000 depending on who you listen to. Great protection of investment...
Summarised: patents have both good and bad effects. The economic studies from my previous post show that the bad effects are worse in case of software patents than the good ones (and undermine other forms of already existing protection for investments in software). So the logical conclusion is: no software patents.
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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).
After I've RTFA it's obvious, the original poster is probably a lawyer. The meaning is the complete oposite of his words.
These privileges are taken away by software patents. Actually, some people go that far as to say software patents are illegal, because they breach international treaties:
Article 10 WIPO, "Contracting Parties may, in their national legislation, provide for limitations of or exceptions to the rights granted to authors of literary and artistic works under this Treaty in certain special cases that do not conflict with a normal exploitation of the work and do not unreasonably prejudice the legitimate interests of the author.
Software patents *do* "conflict with a normal exploitation" of your work as an author of a program, so Beauprez certainly has a point.
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.
The problem is that Poland's vote (8 votes) was wrongly recorded at the meeting in May. However, in the mean time the Polish have gone from stating that they were still against but that there vote was not recorded, to stating that they were in favour of the "compromise". I don't know why or how, but the practical upshot is that we now need 5 more votes to break the qualified majority.
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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.
Given that the Netherlands changed its opinion, they may also start thinking about the reason for which this happened. I.o.w.: a pretty serious political event, lots of press attention, a change for the good in the Dutch position. What better PR could you want?
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