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EU Ministers Went Off-Brief In Patent Vote
MartinB writes "Several EU ministers reportedly went against the wishes of their nations in voting for the proposed EU Software Patent legislation in May. Among those misleading the council of ministers were representatives from Holland, Poland and Germany. The Dutch parliament is going as far as asking to change its vote, which was originally in favour of making software patentable."
This could be a scandal that might rock the comparatively-new EU system for a loop. Ministers were being trusted to represent the view of the government that sent them... but it seems as if business interests have found that these individuals are a weak link that can easily be "bought off" and convinced to act on their own.
Of course, the USA didn't get things right on the first try either. We created a national government under the Articles Of Confederation that had so little power it couldn't tax and therefore quickly ran into problems getting anything done. (The writing of the US Constitution was actually a rather peaceful overthrow of the existing US government of the time rather than the creation of a government where there was none.)
In the USA, the people don't directly elect the president. We might say we do, we might think we do, but really we don't.
What Americans actually vote for is "electors" who have been selected by campaign organizations to be the people who will represent the people who are running for president. Each state holds its own election to determine which slate of electors they will send to the "Electoral College"... whomever gets a majority of the votes for president there wins. (Should three candidates get electoral votes, and nobody gets a majority, the election is kicked to a special session of the House of Representatives where each state gets exactly one vote.)
The point is that these electors were selected by the campaign of the candidate they're supposed to vote for, and are contractually and legally bound to do so... but, uh, what if they don't? That's just plain uncharted Consitutional territory. The Supreme Court would most likely have to issue a ruling that'd end up deciding the outcome, deciding if the votes would stand as originally cast, or if the "expected" result should be used instead effectively making the Electoral College meeting the formality we all want it to be.
That's exactly the situation the EU seems to have worked themselves into here. They've ended up with "unfaithful" representatives who didn't do as they were expected to, and the EU hasn't exactly pondered what to do in such a situation yet.
I'm just saying, it's not like this is a situation that could never happen in the USA...
The text of the submission was somewhat misleading, for a second I thought it read the Dutch wished to support patents - but they really wish to vote no. I just thought someone should make that perfectly clear.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
What? Members of a legislative body voting against the wishes of the body/ies they're supposed to represent?
In other news, the sun rises.
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
Yes, they did [voting against their governments]. But the result is legal and binding, isn't it? If it is,...then, by Holland wanting to reverse its decision, I have a feeling that is legal too...right? It seems we [Free Software Lovers] will be caught up in a legal quagmire, defined as "A difficult or precarious situation; a predicament". I hope the odds are with us. Cb..
If they're worried about ministers not voting according to their briefs, then dump the whole system of ministers and just mail in the briefs! I mean, what's the point of appointing a human being if you're going to get pissed everytime he or she acts like a human being? Why don't you appoint a rubber stamp instead?
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
...gave a flaming speech (german, sorry) for software patents and the protection of intellectual property as the new resources of the 21st century in Munich, 2 days ago. Note the european parliament voted AGAINST the draft, now the senate is clandestinely pushing for it's implementation. We're talking, demonstrating, doing everything in our possibilities here as german software developers, but the "social democratic" guys in power do not care, and do not have a fucking clue what they're talking about. Destroying innovation to appease the big companies :(
If you're in europe, come on join at the FFII and help in the fight, please. It might be our last chance.
A vote in the European Parliament not long before had REJECTED US style software patents, much to support of the vast majority of their constituents.
The ONLY people interested in promoting Software Patents here are a few (not all) of the large corporations (Microsoft, Nokia) and, of course, the IP lawyers, and some relatively influential (unfortunately) politicians and civil servants who have been duped. The VAST majority of others who are aware of this are dead against it. To make the message clear, excuse the shouting...
WE DO NOT WANT SOFTWARE PATENETS HERE.
Software patents are not in force here yet, hopefully they will not be but there is an enormous fight on our hands to prevent it.
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Here in the Netherlands, the fact that that asshole minister of us voted FOR software patents has been a nice little riot in the dutch techie world. People were encouraged to write said minister, write to his party, write to the head of the party, parliament, etc. I think that all of this caused sufficient public backlash that forced our goverment to make that bastard swallow his words and do The Right Thing(tm).
Hate me!
The big corporations see governments as potential threats who'll come after them just like they did against MS. They all learned the lesson long ago and know that using there money they can control politicians and make laws that favor themselves. They're paying good money to get the governments off there back and they certainly expect to have some kind of power in return for such a waste of money.
The corporations won the war.
It's Funny not a Troll (maybe).
Sideshow Bob is on trial for release.
Lawyer: Isn't it true you have Die Bart Die tattoed on your chest.
Sideshow Bob: Actually it's German for The Bart. The.
Head Juror: Oh, well no one who speaks German could be evil.
Sideshow Bob gets released.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
I'm not trolling. But I think the software patent issue is more complicated than you think.
... though I would prefer a middle view that recognizes software as a distinct hybrid of an "idea" and a "device". Such a legal status would also resolve the question of "is code speech?" with the answer "yes and no". (Can you tell I'm Canadian?).
Let me start by saying that I think submarine patents are a gross abuse of the system and should be abolished. And I agree that, in general, intellectual property law needs to be reformed. Both these ideas are beyond the scope of this post.
Now, you ask the average open source advocate what s/he thinks about software patents, and s/he will be opposed to them, on the grounds that they stifle innovation. I can buy that to some extent. However, if you ask the same advocate why s/he wants a particular patent invalidated, it's usually to copy a patented algorithm and incorporate it into an open source product. That doesn't seem like innovation to me. It's true that open source would let others learn about the algorithm and improve on it, but there's nothing preventing you from studying a patent -- in fact that's the whole point of the patent process. If you're keen enough, you can take the ideas in the patent and implement a free work-alike (like png, gzip, or the free equivalent to rsa), and innovate away.
Looking deeper, I don't see that it's consistent to be in favor of patents but opposed to software patents. This is because software blurs the line between a device and a description. For example, consider an integrated circuit. This is clearly a device, and hence patentable, right? But it can be described using a language, such as VHDL. In fact the VHDL can be used with a programmable chip to instantly implement a work-alike to the device. Hence, if the chip is patentable, the VHDL should be patentable too.
It's as though you had a description of a tool (a drill, say), which could be instantly implemented on some universal machine. The description is only trivially different from the tool. (This may sound ridiculous, but with 3-d printers and related technology, the day may not be far off when we see such a thing.)
To take a Touretzkian view, this means that either all patents are valid (including software), or none are
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What right to collect royalties? Their entire problem is that so far they don't have that right!
1. Most software patents I've seen patent ideas or concepts rather than implementations. Let me try to make that a little clear. Like, the AC3 algorithm is patented, which is fine. You can make another format which does the same. A software patent would patent the concept of "multiplexing several audiostreams into one datastream" or somesuch. There's no "innovating" around that. Try looking up how many trivial concepts of a webshop is patented. You'll exceed a dozen patents already on the front page, if not more.
2. Ideas are often trivial to come up with, and should more often than not be dismissed for being obvious. Since that is a sleeping criteria, huge amounts of trivial ideas will be granted a software patent. It is also requires no real-world connection at all. You could pick up "Science Illustrated", and patent everything they claim is "likely to appear in the next 20 years".
3. An expired software patent is still protected by copyright. Since the software itself and the patent description is essentially the same sequence of commands, you can't use it anyway. While whereas with a real patent, I could use your exact blueprints (as appearing in the patent) to build my own device.
Real patents describe a path from state A to B. Software patents describe the process of going from A to B. Getting a patent should mean that you've actually done some work and found a way from A to B, not merely assumed "some way to go from A to B will be invented". That is not innovation. That is profiting from someone else's innovation, and is directly opposed to the purpose for which patents were created.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You're exactly right-- the advocate wants to use a particular technique to build something. Now, if you view this sort of activity as nothing more than a commercial process in which the open source developer is trying to get somethng for nothing , with no greater significance, then it's perfectly reasonable to follow your line of reasoning. Problem is, in the aggregate, building things is how innovation happens. Cut it off and innovation strangles.
The "gray area" for policy makers is not whether software inventions should be considered patentable because of their similarilty/dissimilarity to physical devices. The real argument is whether software patents will advance the process of innovation (and otherwise benefit society), or slow down innovation and harm society. Opponents of software patents have made an excellent case that in this particular situation, at this time, software patents will severely restrict innovation in an important industry.
Now a great deal of their justification comes from the observation that software patents being allowed in places like the US are overly broad and carelessly considered. But more importantly, it comes from a deep understanding of the nature of invention and the state of the art in software. Whether you're considering hardware or software, inventing new things has almost always required the use of components invented by other people. Imagine if the independent inventors of last century had been denied access to the capacitor, battery or transistor-- because those things were patented and only large corporations with legal departments and plenty of capital could afford to license them. So many of the things we take for granted today would never have been invented.
Why are software patents different from these physical devices? For one thing, where many patented devices can be constructed and sold in bulk for a reasonable per-unit price, it's difficult to purchase an algorithm or an application at your neighborhood Fry's. And since corporations generally can't profit through bulk manufacture/licensing of software components, they profit through high licensing fees unmanageable to the small inventor. Or they profit by using their patent portfolios as defensive or offensive weapons against potential competitors. Open source development, arguably one of the most promising engines of 21st century software innovation and cost reduction, is in some cases an innocent victim of this, in others, a direct target.
But here's the important issue: while physical device patents may have encouraged invention and innovation throughout the last century, there is no reason to assume this will be the case for software patents. While an efficient model may develop to smooth over the economic inefficiencies of a software patent system, none has yet, and the interim costs will be high. So the near-to-medium-term result of software patents is not a net increase in innovation or a financial windfall to society, it's exactly the opposite. And for this, some argue that society should subsidize the creation of a software patent industry. I don't think it's worth it, and I think this is the aspect of the debate we should be focusing on.
Fortunately it seems a few European nations have noticed the current US system is only good for patent lawyers and draining resources to fight off vulture corps. Even Microsoft's recent BS patents being awarded had to have helped wake up the EC to the insanity which is destroying the American ability to innovate and compete.
Maybe a few of them also noticed that such legislation was only a first step. Next would have been a "unified" patent database "offered" by the US which would have started with a portfolio of bogus patents owned by US interests. Essentially signing over a world-wide "software tax" to US corporate interests.
Not only would the US businesses continue to be gutted by IP vultures, the EC businesses would have been caught up in the same nightmare. The US is quite welcome to continue destroying the American economy, but thank God the rest of the world has finally noticed the insanity of their patent "system" as a viable model.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
The EU system is still too complex, people doesn't understand how it works, and that's why that kind of weird things find a place to happen.
In a more simple and logical system people is aware of what's going on, and have more direct ways to interact.
Of course EU goverment is still in preliminary stages, we have just aprouved a (still to be referended) new (and complex) constitution, that's why we need to be specially careful. It's really easy that a 'technical' matter as software patents could be politically manipulated by interested lobbies as a 'minor' question.
One of the big problems in the EU process is the dichotomy between states fighting to keep his power, and the need of a better interstate and interregional harmonization, another is the need to equilibrate very different economies. In that big scenario software patents risk to be a undesired and silenced loss!
More than ever we need to keep talking about these things.
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Sorry this is a little bit longer but I have to give my two euro cents to this debate.
Well not being a patent attourney, but being directly affected by it. Yes there are thousands of software patents in europe, most of them illegally and sloppily granted. (Guess the only exception to this is the UK where SWPATS already are legalized on a national level)
Ive read several of them most go like. System and machine implementation - this is the wrapup, then a vague description of the algorithm to cover as many fields as possible.
They were illegally granted (especially in germany) because there was a clear decision years ago, and nobody really currently tries to contest them seriously, at least not outside of the UK. To contest a software patent in the current field could bring down all software patents currently granted by the EPO.
This is also the cause of the pressure of many US multis and the commission for the legalization of the status quo, because 80% of this stuff belongs to IBM Microsoft and Co (with Siemens being the only european corporation having a severe number of SWPATs in the field)...
The problem with the dependency of the US is not really that problematic, the system is currently in the US severely misused and probably will be altered over time once the patent leeches become too dominant, unless they gain too much power, the problem is that nobody wants to have Europe repeating the mistakes of the US (which are court rulings based). But the major parties already signed contracts on the WIPO level years ago, so European politicians feel obligated to follow the bad lead of the US in this case.
An overruling of the WIPO decisicions in Europe basically in the long term would shake the US system and the USPTO to its grounds and basically would in the long run put the patent system on a more sane foundation. The patent in the long term, because Europe and the US are and that is right in my opinion economically dependend on each other. On the other hand a US like patent system all over Europe basically would case a legalized sellout of the entire european software industry (which is 99% small shops anc companies) to patent vulture companies and multinational corporations which mostly are US based and outsourcers to asia.
As for the court thing, this is rather problematic, because if you look at the us, many bogus patents have been tested in court (amazon one click for instance), it all goes down to good laywers and being able to get through it.
Therefore you can see the rise of patent vultures in the US currently which produce nothing but court cases. Those usually have something broad and meaningless on their hand and usually go after the small ones who cannot defend themselves and once knowlegde and funds are improved, go after the big ones.
It is clear that if you apply for a patent law company, that they have a different stance on this issue, because those are the vultures in the system who will or are already feeding on the works of others.
That's a move in the right direction, although I'm quite sceptical about the chances of this silly law to be withdrawn. And I was sure that if someone was going to oppose such an oligrarchic law it would be the Dutch. On the other side there is no much chance the patents law to be applicable. It will probably result in an endless amount of lawsuits between the big companies in style "it was me who invented the paper clip". Finally, I am sure that the open source community will form its movements to try to patent as much software as possible... After all if we can not change the rules, we shall act according to them. And if this weaponry can be used against the open-source movement, then probably there are enough opportunities in the law, so it can be used against the big corporations.