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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.
That's a 1-0 for FOSS. But let's keep in mind that the other side will not give up that easily.
Certain types of software inventions can be patented in Europe, as long as the have a "technological effect". The rules differ between countries (which is presumably why this bill is seen as needed), but what would this legislation permit that isn't already allowable in most countries?
So why is this such a bad thing?
I don't think you can attribute this to things being more sensible over here. In this instance I think we just got lucky (or got some politicians who have figured out that patents will mainly benefit large corporations, most of whom are American)
Cheers
Jeremy
They're paid to convince people to adopt software patents, not to be logical. Don't imagine that what a lobby group says is actually someone's real point of view.
According to Michel Rocard (former France Prime Minister, now European Deputy), companies like US Majors (Microsoft & Co), Nokia or Alcatel exerted pressure on european commission to have a second look at the pattent issue. In this interview (French) Michel Rocard says that the expert group that was supposed to help the commission, was in fact formed by Microsoft and other IT companies.
Rocard said : "We never could have talked a common language with the companies representatives we met - in particular those from Microsoft. Speaking about free ideas circulation, free access to knowledge, was like speaking chinese to them. In their way of thinking, everything that is not usable for immediate profit cease to be a growth vector. They don't seem to be able to understand that an invention which is a pure spirit creation can't be pattented. It's simply terrifying. Many of us, at the Parliament, agree to say that they never have know such a pressure and such a verbal violence during their parliamentary work. It is a huge case."
18 may 2004, Commission presents a new text even more liberal than the first one, and try to impose it during Agriculture Minister Concil, which primary objective was FISHING. Thanks to Poland interventions, the vote is avoided.
"Concerning France, no word from it. Jacques Chirac claimed himself against extensive software pattenting during his presidential campaing. But the current industry minister, Patrick Devedjian said nothing against the text."
I'm all for limiting how and what can be patented in software as, at least in the U.S., to many suits and abuses have come from people trying to collect money on just a few lines of code anyone can easily come up with when they think (read one-click purchasing).
But if someone does come up with something truly unique that is expressed in software, how can this be legally protected so someone else doesn't steal your work after one or one-half year?
Perhaps there should be no software patents at all, just some sort of legal copyright protection for 5 years or so. But how is that uniqueness defined anyway? At what point does a subsection of code become unique enough to be protected?
As me ol' chums would say, this truly is a sticky wicket!
that is, the root of all evil left over after organized religion has taken it's majority share.
The difference between Theory and Practice is greater in Practice than in Theory.
The problem is that coporations pay taxes. As such, this entitles them to those rights. They pay, they gain. However, what they pay in taxes is minimal compared to what the citizenry pay. The solution is not a constitutional amendment. The solution is to eliminate corporate income tax. If they don't pay taxes, they would no longer be "corporate citizens."
This would also go far in eliminating political finance problems. If they don't have that "freedom of speech" ability to make contributions, the parties would have to rely expressly on federal campaign funds and those from individual voters.
What?
Well, I *do* live in the E.U. and I also like open source, so it's actually quite relevant. I know that most slashdotters live in the good old U.S. of A., but Europeans are quite a large minority, I should think. I also know that it wouldn't affect many people *right now* if the bill were passed, but in a few years it might be altogether different if lots of trivial patents were accepted...
One good turn - gets all the covers.
And programmers tend to hang on slashdot and other techie sites, so it is quite relevant to us. If patents are allowed to run their course, then there will be almost no chance of a single coder being able to innovate and bring a new product to market without being sued to crap by a heartless monolith. That's why programmers should care, unless they only want to work for mega corporations...
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Is it me, or is Europe more free than USA? We all know that many Europeans migrated here during the colonies because of tyranny. But they came here to create their own oppression. We got religion everywhere, censored television/radio/newspapers. We also got oligarchs telling us what we can and can not do with the shitty patent system. We need to take the USA back from this people.
For instance, why can't corporations wed? Why can't they adopt children?
Wasn't this the driving idea behind The Truman show. Scary... let's not give them any ideas ok?
Because a software implementation of the RSA public key encryption algorithm amounts to mere information that can be published in a printed book, perhaps with a CD-ROM included. A hardware encryption device cannot; it has to be sold to end-users unit by unit.
This may not sound like such a big deal, but consider the implications for the publishing business. When someone gets a patent on that hardware device, sale of any infringing products will have to cease (or royalties be paid). When the algorithm described and implemented in your book is patented by somebody other than you, are you going to withdraw it from publication? Will people still be able to borrow copies sold to libraries, or are those to be withdrawn from the shelves too?
Note you did nothing illegal, akin to copyright infringement, by publishing unpatended code in the first place. Therefore those copies already in circulation aren't pirate copies. You just have to stop "using" the invention for commercial purposes (such as selling copies of the code) once someone is granted a patent and tells you to stop. This can never happen with copyright, which is always granted to the author without the need to apply for it, and without the comparably broad scope that patents enjoy.
What good is freedom of speech, if somebody else can buy an exclusive right from the government to say something vaguely similar to what I said, and thereby stop me from saying it? If you think political statements can't be made in a programming language, think again.
...of corporations made up of all these people with families etc who lost all their jobs when just a few executives decided to close up the factory and move production to another nation actually voted or approved for that to happen. I'd really like to see some named examples of that occurring, all those little league dads and etc down working on the production floor or out on the docks approving having their jobs evaporate on them so "the corporation" could "increase profits".
That's one of the things wrong with corporations right off the bat, you have to identify all the people involved, just not some of the people. Leave out any humans in the mix, and you are working with skewed data. Money all by itself does nothing, "capital" does not work for you, it just sits there, it takes actual humans doing actual work to make anything of any so called "investment". These corporations get chartered inside a nation, yet no loyalty to that nation or it's people working for them, their original workers, is required to keep their charter in that nation. Foreign chartered corporations are allowed to come in and decide how to use or abuse citizens inside that nation. Uhh, why is that? That's just pure nuts really.
You could then get right into the political process and the whole mess of purchasing government,who can cut the largest check all at once to bribe their way in to get laws skewed to their favor. Or the phenomena that industrial cartels or "trade groups" are lawful everywhere, but "right to work" states with their "fire at will" laws make unionization efforts a moot point when it comes to practicality from the workers POV. They can move the jobs, but it's very hard for most workers to be able to adapt to that as fast or as easily by being able to move themselves and their familes of little leaguers someplace where their cost of living can drop to the level where the sudden "no check at all" can pay for normal things like housing, food, transportation, med care, etc. Show me anyplace in the US where even a single person can live on 5$ a day total pay without living in a cardboard box in an alley someplace, yet that's what the corporations can do in actual fact, force you to compete for your job at that level.
There's something to be said on both sides of the issue, I will grant that readily, but all in all the political and legal system is obviously heavily skewed towards the 1% of the population who own the most "stuff" now, buried inside a bewildering array of daisy chained and interconnected corporations, each layer designed to protect against accountability, identification of ownership, and to shield from any rational responsibility and totally ignored as to any "of benefit to society" as a whole. The other 99% of the population are left to pound sand. That isn't just empty rhetoric, it's modern reality. Here, I can give an easy to see exact example. EVERY study, poll, survey, etc taken in the last several years (that I have seen anyway) indicates quite clearly, with zero ambiguity, the huge overwhelming majority of the US people want to end illegal immigration, to close the borders down better and stop the invasion, because they can see it is more harmful than not. Yet, it still continues with useless babble at the government level. Wonder why that is? Could it be the top corporate 1% and their local wannabes in the corporate world profit from that,they pay off and control government to let the real laws slide in favor of picking and choosing what they want "enforced", as opposed to everyone else, who suffer in many numerous ways? Could it be just the bribed off and controlled aspect of corporations running the government that have allowed that to occur? That should be obvious to see anyway.
Anyhow, here's the challenge, like to see some examples where all the workers inside this corporation with kids in little league "voted" or "approved" to eliminate their jobs and send their jobs someplace else and put themselves into unemployment.
If Billy Boy really found such things offensive, he wouldn't be doing the Chinese wong as much as he has. It's all about mo' money for Billy Boy, and the "Communist" label only matters when he doesn't get his way.
Communist Chinese = capitalist innovators
Communist Europeans = regressive throwbacks
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]
People with jobs, families, communities, little league teams, the works.
I don't see anyone calling for people to lose the right to vote because they work for Wal-Mart. I don't see people calling for the end to individual donations to campaigns.
Get a grip! Corporations are a way to pool resources to get tasks completed in an efficient manner
Yes to "get tasks completed". Not to bribe public officials. No, government subsidies to companies/people that provide the president/congressman/whatever-voting-official a hefty kickback are bad on any continent.
This business of trying to make out corporations as some kind of faceless inhuman creature is just silly.
Penny Arcade has a good tutorial on this. These CxOs and what have you get behind the corporate veil and go hog wild. When they get caught behind the wheel after a drunken joy ride they go "I'm a an incompetent manager who had no idea what the people in my charge were doing. I guess I'll take my $20 million bonus for being a loser and go home now." And hey, thats ok, because even though they're paid to be the "face" of the corporation, they're just as blameless as everyone else in it.
Maybe if the people in charge didn't hide behind the corporate veil when they screw up (or better yet, not screw up in the first place), people would quit calling them "faceless inhuman creatures".
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
This is false!
Read http://wiki.ffii.org/Restart050217En: for correct info: "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 zombie agreement of last May as an A-item without a new vote." and so on.
We are very, very far away from victory.
In statistical mechanics it is well known that, in the agglomeration of many distinct particles, most of the degrees of freedom of those particles are averaged away, leaving only a few key variables (like temperature, pressure, and so forth.)
IMO the same thing holds true for corporations. They are made up of thousands of people, most of them entirely decent people. However, in the agglomerate there is usually only one thing that holds them together, one thing they have in common: the desire to have the corporation survive. None of them would rank survival of the company as the most important part of their lives, but all of the first-rank desires of these people are different, and so wash out under averaging.
This is even more clearly the case when we consider the stockholders of public companies. Most often people who invest in companies are not interested in the behavior of those companies; they think of their investment as being no different than a CD or a savings bond, and so are only concerned with the rate of return. There are some mutual funds out there which only invest in "socially responsible" companies, but they're not too widespread and are generally painted with a broad brush (no tobacco and alcohol companies, for instance). Companies are not generally rewarded by their stockholders for anything other than surviving and being profitable. In addition, if I recall correctly, federal law requires that corporations make being profitable their primary objection, to protect investors. (I'm not sure about the details of this last point.)
Another scientific field of study known as complex systems says that complex behavior can arise from simple components, and that the interaction of components can cause behavior that is entirely different than one would predict from the components separately. (Consider that you are made up of cells, and yet do not behave like a cell.) In the case of corporations, we have a large group of people, mostly rational, caring people, with a common goal of corporate survival and profit. I believe that the interactions of these people create something much different than the people themselves: organizations whose sole drive is survival. If I may be metaphorical, they are like predators always hungry, always looking for their next meal, and their sustenance is capital. They are amoral creatures, but very intelligent.
This behavior is not necessarily caused by the extreme greed of any one person or group of people in the company. I suspect that it is a natural condition that will occur in any large-enough corporation, and it can be prevented only with the intervention of strong-willed leaders who force the company to follow other moral precepts.
This is my theory, anyway.
But in europe they necessarily are not considered to have all rights. The finnish constitution explicitly states that the same rules do not apply to corporations for example.
If a person can be jailed, then we can clearly see that their freedoms can be taken away. Hence, to "jail" a corporation, we should similarly take away their freedoms. After all, we have long had the precedents of "receivership" and other forms of managed bankruptcies; therefore, some variant could be used for the jailed corporation.
... are you really so lacking in enough imagination that you can't come up with these kinds of solution? If anything, you appear to be under the impression that We The People simply cannot apply controls to corporations. We can. And unless we want to continue sinkling into economic slavery, we should.
In other words, the corporation that breaks the law to the degree where jail seems necessary, should effectively be nationalized for a period. That should be a sufficient scare tactic to convince them to obey the law; after all, that's the philosophy of individual legal punishments, right?
So
[You have a stable society when some nut guns down a schoolyard and the law doesn't change.]