Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
no because the GPL'ed software is copyrighted not patented. Not the same thing.
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
I'm not good in groups. It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent. - Q
...when a body which purports to be democratic does not listen to those who represent the people. We have spoken, we have shouted, we have sent you nasty emails. If the bill gets carried, it will indicate that the European Union is designed to give people the appearance of having democratic power with the parliament, while the real power resides with commission, who seem emminantly influenced by big business.
If the commish ignored the last demand, why would they pay attention to this one? Or is this just for the parliament to make their objections absolutely clear?
Also, question: Is the EU parliament in the end going to be, or are they right now, as pissed off about this as Slashdot seems to be? I mean, whether the parliament cares about patents or not, you'd think. In the U.S. if a branch of government got outright snubbed like this they'd probably wind up doing everything in their power to kill the idea of software patents forever, even if they didn't really care about software patents, just out of spite
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
The BBC coverage of this issue states that "The open source movement, of which Linux is the flagbearer, eschews notions of property and instead allows anyone to examine and tinker with the inner workings of software."
As a BBC license payer, I'm incensed that they could be spreading such FUD. Since when has Linux "eschewed the notion of property"?
Just because the open source community is vehemently opposed to software patents, doesn't mean that they don't support the "notion of property". Without such notions as copyright for instance, the GPL would be impossible.
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
Hartmut Pilch, the president of pressure group the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII)...
So Europe has 'pressure groups', while America has lobbyists. Maybe that's our problem -- '**AA lobbyist' sounds too warm and fuzzy. They should be renamed 'motion picture pressure group' or 'recording industry pressure group'. That's got a nice evil ring to it.
I'm not good in groups. It's difficult to work in a group when you're omnipotent. - Q
Nobody wanted this in the first place - except patent lawyers, patent offices and a few large software companies.
Before the directive was proposed by the European Commission, software patents were rejected twice by governments at international diplomat conferences on the change of the European Patent Convention.
Before the directive was proposed the European Commission held a public hearing. 91% of those responding were against software patents. 47% of the rest were patent lawyers and patent offices.
When the European Commission proposed the directive they sent out a press release saying the directive was to make software less patentable (liars!).
The only elected institution in EU is the European Parliament. Here the proposed directive was amended to not allowing unlimited patentability of all software and business metods.
Later the European Counsil amended the directive again, undoing most of the amendments the the Parliament did.
And now the European Commission and the Counsil (both non-elected, but appointed) are pressing to go through with the directive, completely ignoring the rights of the European Parliament.
As an ignorant American, I found this description of the various EU institutions very helpful. Interesting to note that the Parliament can dismiss the Commission if it desires to do so, and it would be interesting to see this happen, or at least have the threat of it issued to enforce Parliament's request/demand.
Making a 'commercial product' out of something GPL-licensed doesn't 'negate' the GPL in any way.
The GPL does not make any distinction between 'commercial' or 'non-commercial' distribution. Any and all distribution must follow the terms of the GPL. Commercial or not doesn't enter the picture.
Don't you know there are commercial linux distributions out there?
And patents and copyrights are completely different forms of protection. You can't patent music. But that doesn't mean it isn't protected by copyright.
Anti-EU people take this example to denigrate the integration process, but in fact it shows that MORE integration is necessary.
For instance the parliament still has little power, but without it this directive would have been passed months ago. Without EU at all, it would have been passed years ago under pressure from US-based megacorporations.
I'd say that even though the situation is dangerous, it shows that the European parliament is perfectly doing its job and representing the will of the European people, and counterbalancing the ivory power that is the Commission. In particular, kudos to Michel Rocard, former French Prime Minister and one of the main forces in this legislative fight. A friend of mine met him when he was just starting to discover the issue; and he was pleasantly suprised to find how he listened to anti patent arguments and quickly acquired knowledge and decided to act.
Here in Denmark, for example, the government is appointed by our Queen. Our queen is the only danish citizen that is not allowed to have a political opinion (at least not publicly), so she is supposed to select the government that is best for Denmark, regardless of politics. Our democratically elected parliament can at any time sack our government with a simple majority vote. The result is that the government our queen appoints has the best possible backing from our parliament.
But there is another problems with the government in Denmark and most (all?) other european countries: Although the government risk being sacked by the parliament, they are not bound by decisions of the parliament on questions of EU policy.
This is why we have this strange situation in Europe where most national parliaments are against software patents, while the EU Council (really the club of governments of the EU countries) is pushing for legalization of software patents.
You're confusing two issues: how your national government is brought into power and how that reflects on the European Commission.
You have a system by which you get a government and, for better or for worse, that government represents you. One of the things that government does is represent your interests in international bodies, including the EU. If you aren't happy with the way you get your government, that's a national problem. You could guillotine your queen and have a revolution, for example. However, most people do actually consider Denmark a democracy. Furthermore, I suspect your government would actually be free to ask the people and hold a referendum on its Commissioners.
If your government isn't acting the way your parliament wants it to, it sounds like your parliament has the option of dissolving it (I don't know how Danish government works), but apparently it doesn't care enough about this issue to take that step. That's not unusual, and it's by design: democracy does not mean that the majority, or even the majority of representatives, gets their will on every issue. It's similar in the US, where the Senate and the House are two separate bodies that control each other, and the executive branch has a lot of separate powers, and they aren't all always consistent with each other.
Historically, the Commission makes sense; giving lots of power to the European Parliament overnight would have been insane since people had no idea of how the politics would work out, while the Commission grew out of the mechanisms all member states were already using for interacting. Again, I don't like many of the decisions the Commission has been making, and it sounds like it's time to give more power to the European Parliament. But the fact that things are the way they are isn't the result of some insane European bureaucracy or anti-democratic movement, it's the prudent and natural way to achieve what the European Union is trying to achieve. European Parliament could easily have turned out to be a bunch of anti-democratic hoodlums and kooks, in which case we'd all be grateful that we didn't hand over power over our lives to them.
"Without protection for IP, including patents, the value of software falls to zero"
Software patent have existing for about 10 years (more or less). So are you saying the economic value of software before 1994 was zero?
I'll assume I don't have to point to the multitude of examples that prove this to be false?
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you