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European Parliament Rejects Software Patents
heretic9 writes "The European Parliament unanimously rejected the software patent bill recently put before it. Hugo Lueders of CompTIA, a pro-patent lobby group, said that the benefits of the bill had been obscured by special interest groups, which muddied debate about the rights and wrongs of software patents." Meaning, essentially, that the Conference of Presidents got its way.
Very good. Now that it has definitely been rejected, it will be much harder for a software patent bill to be passed through the European Parliament again without the wording being changed significantly. This probably won't happen any time soon...
One good turn - gets all the covers.
Indeed, they seem to be harassing the parliament in a such a way that the possibility of software patents being accepted goes thinner and thinner.F %2Fwww.lemonde.fr%2Fweb%2Frecherche_articleweb%2F1 %2C13-0%2C36-398497%2C0.html&langpair=fr%7Cen&hl=e n&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&prev=%2Flanguage_tools
Here is an interview with the head of EU parliament juridic commission: http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2
There is something politicians do not like, and this is being trampled over. Apparently software patent apologists have overstated their point dangerously.
The directive was NOT rejected by the EU Parliament, but by the Conference of Presidents - essentially the group leaders of all the various parliamentary parties. It's still a good step, but it's misleading to claim this was an action by the Parliament as a whole.
This does NOT mean that the bill "is thrown out". It means that the EU Parliament is supporting it's own legal affairs committee's call for the EU Commission to restart the process and have directed the President of the EU Parliament to officially request a restart.
The bill must not "go back to the EU" for reconsideration - the EU Commission must decide whether it wants to accept the restart vote by parliament, ignore it, or overrule it. The latter two would mean the Council would go ahead as before.
Thats just the thing. Corporations are legally entitled to all the rights of people. That is what makes them so powerful. You can't jail a corporation; indeed, the worst you can do is revoke its charter (which doesn't happen very often). Basically most corporate punishment comes down to fines, which, if not hefty enough, don't deter future misconduct.
Read up on Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886). This is the case that defined corporations as legal people, with all the fun rights we enjoy.
IMO, a constitutional amendment to revoke such rights is in order. I do recall presidential candidates David Cobb (Green), and Michael Badnarik (Libertarian) calling for those rights to be eliminated. Cobb asked for a constitutional amendment, but Badnarik did not endorse an amendment outright.
The doctrine of 'technical effect' is a bizarre example of how a patent office, left to its own devices, will reinterpret the law in increasingly creative ways to expand its own powers.
0 65.html explains, first of all the EPO made a ruling that although programs for computers are explicitly excluded under the European Patent Convention, this did not apply when the computer program could be shown to have a 'technical effect'. This 'technical effect' is nowhere mentioned in the EPC's exclusion; it is an invention by the patent office to have some reason to grant patents on software.
As the thread http://www.aful.org/wws/arc/patents/2000-06/msg00
So for a few years you could get software patents in Europe if you could include some reasoning in your application to say that your program has a 'technical effect' when loaded onto a computer. Since the idea of technical effect is so vague, this allows through any software patent.
Then a few years later the EPO decided that they might as well drop the pretence, and made another ruling which assumes that all computer programs have a 'technical effect'. So the explicit exclusion in the EPC is being ignored.
Now, patents granted under this dubious reasoning are not very enforceable. National courts tend to interpret the law as it is written, and not the EPO's creative interpretation. However, if the directive is passed then the already-granted software patents in Europe (which are just as silly as those in the US, see the FFII horror gallery) will become legal.
The European law on patentability of software does not need 'clarifying', it is already quite explicit. We need to make the patent office follow the law as it stands.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
And also know that Union Pacific now owns Southern Pacific, so it can be said that Union Pacific is what caused the downfall of our country. They also (through a grandfathered law of the 1800s) have the only private security force in the US with full arresting and authorization to use lethal force.
The idea of one-click-shopping is not protected in EU, but a particular implementation is protected by copyright.
Further, since you are not required to distributed code in source, it can be quite hard to copy your implementation.
Software is protected by copyright which expires 70 years after the death of the author - if copyright is owned by a company, then 70 years after publication (AFAIK).
Patents allow protection of ideas. These expires after 20 years from the patent being issued.
While JURI (a committee of Members of the European Parliament) and the Council of Ministers have both voted for a restart, the European Commission are still legally allowed to push this through to it's second reading if they manage to put it on an agenda as an A-item.
A-items are a rubber stamping of translations, of previously agreed directives. So far, Poland have been blocking the A-item from getting onto any agendas, but they seem to have finally been nobbled.
Just in time, Denmark have decided to dig their toes in, but if they fold there is still an oportunity to push the directive through.
Of course, flouting the wills of MEPs in this way might be enough to galvanise them into kicking the whole thing out in the second reading, despite the fact that the voting system at that stage is rigged against such an eventuality.
Debian: GNU/Linux done the Linux way
What country are you in? Corporations don't pay taxes in addition to their many other benefits as "people." That's part of the problem. They have a million loopholes to get out of taxes.
Laws are for people with no friends.
Here are some relavant portions of the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (the bible by which patents are examined in the US.)
The USPTO's public MPEP
From MPEP 2106, all emphasis added
The claimed invention as a whole must accomplish a practical application. That is, it must produce a "useful, concrete and tangible result." State Street, 149 F.3d at 1373, 47 USPQ2d at 1601-02. The purpose of this requirement is to limit patent protection to inventions that possess a certain level of "real world" value, as opposed to subject matter that represents nothing more than an idea or concept, or is simply a starting point for future investigation or research (Brenner v. Manson, 383 U.S. 519, 528-36, 148 USPQ 689, 693-96); In re Ziegler, 992, F.2d 1197, 1200-03, 26 USPQ2d 1600, 1603-06 (Fed. Cir. 1993)). Accordingly, a complete disclosure should contain some indication of the practical application for the claimed invention, i.e., why the applicant believes the claimed invention is useful.
A process that consists solely of the manipulation of an abstract idea is not concrete or tangible. See In re Warmerdam, 33 F.3d 1354, 1360, 31 USPQ2d 1754, 1759 (Fed. Cir. 1994). See also Schrader, 22 F.3d at 295, 30 USPQ2d at 1459. Office personnel have the burden to establish a prima facie case that the claimed invention as a whole is directed to solely an abstract idea or to manipulation of abstract ideas or does not produce a useful result. Only when the claim is devoid of any limitation to a practical application in the technological arts should it be rejected under 35 U.S.C. 101. Compare Musgrave, 431 F.2d at 893, 167 USPQ at 289; In re Foster, 438 F.2d 1011, 1013, 169 USPQ 99, 101 (CCPA 1971). Further, when such a rejection is made, Office personnel must expressly state how the language of the claims has been interpreted to support the rejection.
There is always some form of physical transformation within a computer because a computer acts on signals and transforms them during its operation and changes the state of its components during the execution of a process. Even though such a physical transformation occurs within a computer, such activity is not determinative of whether the process is statutory because such transformation alone does not distinguish a statutory computer process from a nonstatutory computer process. What is determinative is not how the computer performs the process, but what the computer does to achieve a practical application. See Arrhythmia, 958 F.2d at 1057, 22 USPQ2d at 1036.
For such subject matter to be statutory, the claimed process must be limited to a practical application of the abstract idea or mathematical algorithm in the technological arts. See Alappat, 33 F.3d at 1543, 31 USPQ2d at 1556-57 (quoting Diamond v. Diehr, 450 U.S. at 192, 209 USPQ at 10). See also Alappat 33 F.3d at 1569, 31 USPQ2d at 1578-79 (Newman, J., concurring) ("unpatentability of the principle does not defeat patentability of its practical applications") (citing O'Reilly v. Morse, 56 U.S. (15 How.) at 114-19). A claim is limited to a practical application when the method, as claimed, produces a concrete, tangible and useful result; i.e., the method recites a step or act of producing something that is concrete, tangible and useful. See AT&T, 172 F.3d at 1358, 50 USPQ2d at 1452. Likewise, a machine claim is statutory when the machine, as claimed, produces a concrete, tangible and useful result (as in State Street, 149 F.3d at 1373, 47 USPQ2d at 1601) and/or when a specific machine is being claimed (as in Alappat, 33 F.3d at 1544, 31 USPQ2d at 1557 (in banc). For example, a computer process that simply calculates a mathematical
For the perlexed, here's how this works.
Roughly speaking, the EU has a bicameral legislature, with the two houses being the Parliament and the Council. However, neither one of those bodies can introduce legislation; rather, legislation begins with a third body, the Commission.
Now, European regulations ostensibly do not permit the patenting of a computer program, as such. However, the European Patent Office, has for a while now been interpreting those regulations differently than you or I would, and issuing software patents anyway. However, such patents have not held up in court.
So the Commission drafts a new patent directive that would explicitly permit software patents that had some "technical effect," a term broad enough to encompass just about anything.
The draft directive next goes to the Parliament, where it gets severely amended, such that it would exclude most software patents.
The amended directive then goes to the Council, where it is re-amended to resemble the original version. And then something weird happens. While the pro-patent contingent got its act together long enough to amend the directive, it never got around to voting to send the amended version back to Parliament, and then, it was unclear whether they had a majority in Council anymore, and then, Council went on break.
If the Council ever gets around to sending its version back to Parliament, Parliament will have to scrape together an absolute majority (rather than the qualified majority they needed to have to amend it in the first place) to either reject or further confuse the process. If they prove unable to do so within 3 (or 4, if they vote themselves a further delay) months (a distinct possibility), then the directive comes into force, and all the various national legislatures are supposed to harmonize their laws with the directive.
wow you stupid?
...oooohhh so scary... Fired ceo's get hired as CEO at other places quickly. look at the enron Executive staff...
corperations are there to SHIELD the people behind it from penalty.
without a corperation a scumbag CEO would think twice before doing something tha twill get his ass personally sued out of existance. under a corp he can do what he pleases without any reprocussions other than getting fired
Study after study shows that software innovation does not happen because people want to get a monopoly, but because they have since otherwise the competition will catch up to them. The industry needs cheap, fast and narrow protections (similar to copyright), because patents are inherently so broad they are clogging up the system with thickets. The big companies aren't all cross licensing their patents just for fun.
There is already copyright which provides for a protection until 75 years after the author's death. However, it only covers direct copying (partial or entirely), or plagiarizing (this can include reverse engineering and writing your own version based on the gained knowledge, if you don't take proper precautions)Independent writing of a similar program (which simply does the same, but otherwise is in no way based on the original program) is not covered by copyright. That's a feature of copyright, not a bug. As such, copyright does give you a short time span on which you are alone on the market with that feature.
It definitely won't be 5 years in general, but even 5 years is an eternity in terms of software development.
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You know, you certainly need to learn to use google.
From the ACLU
Why the Patriot Act's expansion of records searches is unconstitutional
Section 215 of the Patriot Act violates the Constitution in several ways. It:
* Violates the Fourth Amendment, which says the government cannot conduct a search without obtaining a warrant and showing probable cause to believe that the person has committed or will commit a crime.
* Violates the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech by prohibiting the recipients of search orders from telling others about those orders, even where there is no real need for secrecy.
* Violates the First Amendment by effectively authorizing the FBI to launch investigations of American citizens in part for exercising their freedom of speech.
* Violates the Fourth Amendmentby failing to provide notice - even after the fact - to persons whose privacy has been compromised. Notice is also a key element of due process, which is guaranteed by the Fifth Amendment.
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Strangely enough, I don't believe you. If a corporation has the same rights, it should have the same responsibilities. That's so obviously not true that I leave it to you to demonstrate to your own curiosity.
Furthermore, if a corporation kills, it should be jailed for it. When's the last time that happened? Right, it never has.
Until the Corporate Death Penalty is explicitly enacted de facto or de jure, then I'll start believing in a corporation's "personhood".
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
http://pythonisito.blogspot.com/
Here.
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The small company protecting its assets with a patent from a large company generally simply doesn't work in practice. Suppose you do have the funds for a court case, even then the other side (e.g. IBM) will probably have ten times as many patents your programs infringe on, so they'll countersue you if you don't want to settle.
Have a look at how they treated Sun this way in the eighties...
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The Patent Office has today announced a series of workshops to examine the possibility of a more concrete definition of "technical contribution" in the Software Patent directive (NB: Registration deadline 18 February) More see FFII UK.
"I have a question. Why doesn't the open source community start patenting the things THEY do which are original and not just state-of-the-art?"
So, do you have the bucks for filing each and every patent? Do you have the money for defending all the patent cases which will challenge all the Open Source patents?
Also, most good Linux coders I know would rather spend their time coding, rather than doing the paperwork and worrying about court cases.
Things are a lot more free, and technology flourishes faster, when you simply rely on Copyright Protection rather than Patent Protection.
And I do believe most people in the Open Source Community would rather benefit from faster innovation than slower innovation.
At worst, what you propose is a final fallback position. We really don't want to go there, as having to do a patent search before we implement the next greatest technology will stifle us in getting the code out.