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Euro Patent Restart Demand Repeated by Parliament
sebFlyte writes "ZDNet UK is reporting that the European Parliament's Conference of Presidents has ratified and repeated the demands of the Parliament for the computer-implemented inventions directive to be sent back to the drawing board, even though the Commission has refused to re-start it after previous demands. From the article: "It is not certain that the Commission will comply with the request of the Parliament, nor that it will use the opportunity to draft a good text ... The new Commission is not obliged to follow the Parliament's request and they might still try to keep all options open and ask the Council to adopt the agreement of last May without a new vote, so as to gain even more options for themselves."
Perhaps a bit off-topic, but if software CAN'T be patented, then couldn't one LEGALLY take that unpatented open source code and make a commercial product out of it, thus negating the GPL? (IANAL, and it shows)
People who think they know everything really piss off those of us that actually do.
FTA [i]Hugo Lueders, the director of public policy at pro-patent organisation CompTIA, is also unsure what will happen next. He contends that software patents are needed to ensure that the EU can keep to the goals set by the "Lisbon Agenda" --- that the EU will become the most competitive and dynamic knowledge-driven economy by 2010.[/i] Does that comment sound like: 1. Establish Software Patents 2. ??????? 3. Thriving and Inventive Computer Industry (ha!) 4. Profit! to anyone else?!?
I consider myself a pro-European Brit, but the intransigence and power of the unelected Commision to act in the face of the elected Parliament makes me foam at the mouth like Norman Tebbit. Is it really so hard for them to see that those with a mandate should be sovereign?
I want a close and strong European Union -- I just don't want this European Union.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
The players:
European Parliament's Conference of Presidents
the Commission
the Parliament
The new Commission
the Council
Ok, I'm lost. Though I think I can see why nothing's happening.
It reminds me of a The Committee Game someone wrote on our PDP11 about 25 years ago. (The committee forms to form a plan of action to deal with the nefarious Kally Spaeth, but first they head up to McDonalds for refreshments in the arcane Dodge Dart, and generally it's a lot of running around without actually doing anything about the nefarious Kally Spaeth. I think it was in parody.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Does the EU even *have* a government? This is so confusing! Motions that can be executed with no vote, organizational groups that do what they want regardless of the vote? What gives? It's like the thing was designed *by*, bureucrats *for* bureaucrats, and voting is just a technicality.
Can somebody help to make me less ignorant and point me at an online EU-civics 101 tutorial that outlines how the EU government is organized, what are the responsibilities of the major components and a general overview of the rules?
Please?
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
Would someone please clarify the players in EU lawmaking, and their role in the process? America at least has floated cartoons making our quaint process clear to naive schoolchildren (of any age). Where do members of the following bodies come from: election by people per nation / across the EU; or sent as representatives of national governments; or selected by the EU government itself? Where do the laws/regulations/rules/treaties/agreements they produce come from: national governments; EU government subdivisions; independent citizens; overseas committees like the US; nongovernment foreign or European policy organizations? And where do the rules they produce go: to another body for decision, to national governments for ratification, or just into effect as law?
The players:
- EU Parliament
- EU Commission
- EU Council
- Any others (like, eg, some kind of "EU Parliament/Council Reconciliation Committe")?
--
make install -not war
This is great news, I hope that everyone who has not contacted their MEP will do so via faxmymp or otherwise. I may even go to the effort of sending a letter in the post to mine to say thanks, and to continue to listen elected voters over companies. Remember the parliment makes the decision based on voters preferances, it it just up to us to tell MEPs what we want.
Conference of Presidents, Council, Commission, Parliament.... For the poor confused Americans among us, could somebody draw us the European equivalent of the "how a bill becomes law" flow chart? I'm completely lost.
--Bruce Fields
The EU is not a government.
It's primarily a trading body, but has pretentions to be more than that.
The EU Commission is appointed by the individual member states, so whilst we can't vote for them directly we can kick out the morons who put them there.
The EU Parliament is directly elected, but has little actual power - there are too many vested interests to ever give it any real power... it makes decisions over minor matters.
The European Court is the bit that keeps the countries in line with their treaty obligations... they actually have the power to force governments to change their laws (the UK is often being slapped down these days because of its draconian 'anti-terrorist' laws like imprisonment without trial... we have out own camp X-Ray called Belmarsh, and the EU Court has basically ordered the government to close it).
There's another one I think (I thought there were 4 parts to the EU... might be wrong).
Who is in charge over there?
How is the government supposed to work?
Why do they vote on some things and not others?
Are there multiple mechanisms to pass laws?
Are the "parliament" and the "commission" similar to our "house" and "senate"?? That would explain the back and forth, but it doesn't look like they both need to approve of this thing to make it happen.
Regardless, I've told my european friends and coworkers to watch that their new government doesn't do like ours and take control from the states and later hand it over to large corporations. They all laughed.... even I didn't expect it to happen so quickly.
to a year or two.
We're clever enough to come up with our own techniques in the short term to compete with closed source companies doing interesting short term things. I'd have no complaint with that level of competition. If a technique is really crucial and unavoidable, we can just wait a couple of years.
It's the medium to long term which is a problem, because we all converge on the same techniques - they are quite fundamental after all - and we need to be able to use our ideas in a reasonable time frame, not 27 years after having them...
A registry of techniques would be nice as a library, but it's not really workable for patent prevention.
Personally I come up with new techniques every day, as I'm sure many people here do. It's not feasible to write them all down, let alone register them in a formally searchable way. That's called "writing a book or article", and it's a lot of work in itself.
Part of the problem is that we've been inventing things at a rapid pace for decades, but most ideas are left unused and not written anywhere until an opportunity when it's _appropriate_ to use them crops up.
In other words, ideas sometimes get patented after lots of people have them, but before anyone actually uses them.
For example, IBM's patent on RCU - that's something I independently came up with when writing a small OS a decade before RCU was mentioned on the Linux lists. But, I didn't have a use for it in that OS (which I deleted all copies of anyway), and I can't prove prior art. I could have "published" it, but frankly publishing every idea like that is more work than it's worth.
I'm sure that has happened with many people here.
(I don't know the filing date of IBM's patent; that example is just to illustrate how potential prior art is easily lost).
If good ideas (of the currently patentable kind) were rare, then a registry would work. But when you're coming up with neat ideas daily, then if there was a registry of "official" prior art, a lot of ideas that people have had and maybe talked about would not have the chance to get in.
So even if there was a registry, we would still have unreasonable problems caused by the patent system.
-- Jamie
Since BBC is developing open source software too, doesn't that make them part of the movement? http://www.bbc.co.uk/rd/projects/dirac/overview.sh tml
There is no practical difference between a written book or short story and a piece of code. Both take someone with at least some sort of minimal skills and on up from that point to sit down and type up various things in an unique sequence in some arbitrary language. And that's it. If a dozen people write the code it could become a big program, if a dozen people all write and collaborate on a project it could become a magazine instead of a novel, in other words, big hairy deal. If you accept software patents it should follow then you should accept patenting novels or magazines, and I think you'd find it hard to find many people who thought that wise.
Civilization and "creative progress" existed for millenia before this scam of patenting software itself got invented, and that's all it is is a paperwork razzle dazzle shuffle scam. It happened during the rough time span when the financial phony products "industry" grifters were running out of other paper product snake oil scams to milk people out of their cash for. Been an expensive elaborate joke and skim and put the con on consumers ever since.
All this valuable "software patenting" stuff creates so called "patented products" that don't even have a normal consumer warranty with them, another *obvious* scam and rip off, and you have no right to resell, dissasemble, zip, like you would if you bought an honest tangible patented product, acme vacuum cleaner for instance. I don't need to sign a "license" to resell my vacuum cleaner at a yard sale,or repay the same fee yearly. I don't need to worry about "violating the law" if I take a screw driver to it, I don't need a "license to vacuum", I am not forced to destroy the vacuum rather than reselling it. But, "patented software" all that applies to conversationally speaking. Sorry, you may have the slickest program in the world, but the second there's a patent attached to it it becomes part of an elaborate fraudulent congame.
Copyright-acceptable more or less, but patent? HAHAHAHA!
As to those middle man skimmers with their "capital", they existed for millenia also, the planet has always been infested with moneychangers, so be it, they'll find a way to weasel their way into some other easy money con without software being patented. -> "the hedged derivative shortly to the longwise reverse floating point waved bond share of your perpetual debt note" or some ridiculous babbling noise like that. Software patents are a variant on that scam, nothing more. The software can be good bad or mediocre quality, that ain't the point, the point is the patent part is a middleman skim dodge. Easy to see, too. Those black suited grifters have amazing imaginations when it comes to getting out of their own productive work and using someone else's, so don't you worry none about them, in china or any place else, coming up with some way to "profit", they'll think up a few dozen more ways before noon if you take software patents back away from them at 8 am.