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EU Software Patent Directive Adopted
sebFlyte writes "FTA: "An EU Council spokeswoman said on Monday morning that the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive had been adopted." Apparently it's due to 'institutional reasons' that they're ignoring the outcry from developers and several nation states ..."
THESE FUCKERS!
So if the reason for letting the directive pass now was simply "administrative" and not related to its actual content and meaning, this leaves space for it to be rejected later.
Being personally deeply affected by this directive - I own a software company that does a huge amount of R&D - I really hope the MEPs will do the right thing.
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Before the doom sayers start with the end of the world predictions, note the last bit of the artical:
"The directive will now be passed to European Parliament, which can reject or amend the proposal, for a second reading."
What the hell on a stick with a bag of chips and a large soda consisting of coke, mountain dew, and a splash of root beer?
These people will cry the day they get a cease and desist from Microsoft because their child programmed a bubble sort in LOGO class, in first grade.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
we'll have to write good, patent infringing software. software that is so good it causes the downfall of a company and benefits the world while doing it. all of this, while trying to remain anonymous. i take this time to wish everyone good luck.
When I tell an object to delete this, am I killing it or telling it to kill me?
Note that this means it goes back to parliament for a second reading (where an _absolute_ majority of 376 votes in the Parliament or something like that is needed to do *anything* about it (i.e. abstentions, absences, etc. count as votes _for_ the directive) - seems to be corruption is build into system, but there you go).
Time for a straightforward declaration of our own, I think:
"We, the undersigned, will not honour or respect european patent law any more. There are millions of us. You'll have to kill us all before you ever get your patent monopolies, you corrupt corporatist fuckers. Good day."
This is now in the hands of our beloved European Parliament. I understand that most of the MEPs have long since been lobbied to the brink of resignation on this issue, but let's make them work for their croissants and travel expenses. The linkk below is to a list of UK MEP's email addresses: http://vox.org.uk/MEPMail.htm Sean
RTFA. The European Parliament still has to vote on it, and have rejected it before.
Best information source for the EU patent-problem.
Here's the press release
If you live in a country like France where you'll have to vote the constitution, make sure you vote NO to punish the council and the commission for their behaviour.
I personally don't want to live in a dictatorship where the will of the parliament is disregarded by people who have been elected by no-one.
Today's commission is like russia's communist party. Make sure they go back to home with a lesson they will never forget.
And as someone else already said: the Council has adopted its "common position" (although it was far from common in this case). It still has to get into the European Parliament, through its second reading (where it can be amended or even rejected, after which the whole game is immediately over).
Anyway, as far as I am concerned, the big news is not what they adopted (a directive text which codifies the European Patent Office's US practice), but how they adopted it. Three countries with the support of several others asked to reopen discussions, and the Luxembourg presidency simply denied that even though they have to let the Council as a whole decide about that according to their own rules of procedure (point 3.8).
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It's not at all obvious. The Parliament is supposed to gain more power on paper, but there are several complicating factors, like the new President, Foreign Ministry, and streamlined Council. The BBC have attempted to summarise it..
/usr/games/fortune > ~/.signature
The only institution that can stop this madness now is the EU parliament and it has shown several times now, that it is willing to do just that.
They even asked the EU-Commission to restart the whole process, but the Commission flat out denied this request. I can't imagine that members of parliament like to be treated like that.
So please, write your local member of the EU parliament and tell him that you ask him to do everything within his power to stop this madness.
In other words, the EU Council has just stated that form is more important than meaning, and that it is more important that the bureaucrats are able to create legislation quickly and effortlessly than the legislation being fair and correct.
This is the crappiest thing I've heard in a long while! What's next, stopping citizens from seeing official documents because it creates unnecessary expenses and only whiners ask to see them anyway? Or removing the right to vote for all citizens of the EU, because recurring elections could hamper the ability of EU politicians to make long-term plans?
--Bud
From TFA: Last week it was reported that Denmark would attempt to have the directive listed as a B-item, rather than an A-item, allowing the text to be renegotiated.
And so they did. Try, that is. But was told that it was impossible for an A-item to become a B-item. They believed it, and didn't object further. This is bogus, because there's nothing that prevents A-items to be ruled as B-items. I smell a rat!
Underholdning.info
I've been fundamentally opposed to the EEC/EU for as long as I've been an adult voter. I first voted "No" to a proposal to expand EEC powers in 1986, and I've consistently followed this path, ever since.
In recent years, however, I had been considering a number of arguments in favour of the EU, and I was actually leaning towards voting in favour of the new constitutional treaty, at the upcoming referendum (in my native Denmark).
Not any longer.
If I had any doubts about voting "No" at the upcoming referendum, this situation has removed them. The process has revealed a complete disinterest in democracy at the highest levels of the EU - and a servility towards "business interests" (for which read: certain major corporations and their vested interests in maintaining their monopolistic powers) that borders on the shameful.
The autumn, I will go to the polls and vote "No". I urge any Europeans with similar concerns to adopt the same position.
- Peter Ravn Rasmussen
Instead of coming up with asinine excuses, they tell us the truth, we're doing it DESPITE the protest against it!
Or as they put it, "We are adopting the position for institutional reasons so as not to create a precedent which might have a consequence of creating future delays in other processes."
In other words, they want to do what they want to do, and they don't want protests or disagreements getting in their way, now or ever.
I guess Europe just fell to corporate interests.
I think it's shocking that we're giving all tech freedom to China. It'll be the only country on they planet where it'll be legal to double click and include a help icon with your software.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
Repeatedly ask the same question till you get the "correct" answer
:(
:(
and if you get bored doing that demonstrate that you didn't give a damn anyway.
I don't fathom how I can possibly write any software that doesn't infringe "something", all the more amusing if I sat in a room for some time and worked out an "obvious" way to solve some problem.
I think it's fair to say that China is going to kick us all inside out with technological advancement now. Well, serves us right in some way I guess
So (nearly) did a blanket 100PS power limit on every motorcycle manufactured in or imported into the EC. This was former Commissioner Martin Bangemann's pet project, and it took intensive lobbying from among others, the Motorcycle Action Group and Triumph Motorcycles to slow it down, but it only died when Bangemann himself ceased to be a Commissioner.
This was a virtally unresearched, transparently anti-competitive (Bangemann was trying to protect BMW, who, up until about five years ago, had a similar self-imposed limit) piece of legislation, supported by almost no-one else and more than once rejected by the European Parliament, yet it still took the downfall of its sponsor to kill it.
Moral?
EU Commissioners have far too much power, far too little responsibility, and are too difficult to get rid of.
Incidentally, I'm uncertain whether BMW themselves actually had anything to do with this mess, but shortly afterward, they lifted their self-imposed limit and now make some very nice bikes.
The number of possible ways to effectively accomplish something in software is limited.
A patent grants EXCLUSIVE rights to one of those ways.
Therefore, you have just created a land war. Only the rich and monied win a land war. Soon, you'll have nowhere to live. Good luck with that.
Put simply, there is no "stealing of ideas". That's ludicrous. I take your car? You have no car. I take your method of bush trimming? Both of our bushes get trimmed. That's life.
That's also the worst case. On the other hand, what if I develop a similar way of trimming bushes? Now who's stealing. I just wanted to trim my bushes, now you can take money from me! Who's the thief?
At some point the businesses of the world are being given the power to own the EXCLUSIVE right to sell something. I think we all know why that's bad. No competition == screwing people.
It's bad when the government mandates it (national telecomm companies). It's bad when monopoly enforces it (Standard Oil, Microsoft). It's bad when the people suffer it.
If I develop MY IDEA independently of you, I'll be damned if your patent should matter to me. Unfortunately, this is now my problem.
Worse, now the only people with significant patent portfolios won't be people. Instead they'll be the most morally reprehesible construct mankind has ever unleashed--corporations. Worst of all, they're pretty much designed to aggregate financial and legislative power.
Someday, this may cause a revolution...I hope.
I think Mauve has the most RAM. --PHB (Dilbert Comic)
No one is defending stealing. The problem is (or this is the belief of many here) that it is not possible to write software without violating patents unvoluntarily: if you write a large enough software package, you just end up implementing patented algorithms without realising it. This leads to a situation where only big corporations can develop software (since they have a stack patents that they can bargain with when someone claims they're violating a patent). A "GNU license" is not going to help you there.
Stopping the new Constitution will not get rid of the EU, or make it more democratic. Voting "no" will keep it the way it is now.
So you would be doing the "people who have a complete disinterest in democracy" a big favour by voting "No".
The new European Constitution greatly enhances the powers of the European Parliament, and so tricks like what the Council did today would become a lot harder.
There are 2 ways out of this undemocratic EU. One is to get rid of it. This is clearly not an option -- almost all economic growth in Europe in the last 20 years is due to the single market. Removing it would be an economic disaster.
Option 2 is to overhaul the EU to make it a lot more democratic. While I agree that it doesn't go far enough, the new Constitution is a huge step in the right direction.
So, please vote "Yes" on the new Constitution. It's our only way out!
The European Parliament and individual EU member states can lodge a complaint at the European Court of Justice, yes. Additionally, if the directive ever comes through, individual citizens can also lodge a complain at the European Court of Justice if they feel it tramples on their liberties.
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It's not socialism that we're trying to aviod in Europe. It's American-style capitalism.
We need to avoid both. A corporation that can influence government policy in its own interests is essentially part of an enlarged state. We even speak of the M$ tax already.
Vote a punitive NO, emigrate or learn a new job (as you may have guessed I'm busy doing). Those are your only options, non-exclusive.
Where are you going to immigrate to? It looks like the whole western world is falling beneath the monopoly behometh of (software) patents. We can expect Trading Technologies to shake down all trading firms, large and small, as well as all western exchanges, and Microsoft will leverage patents to eradicate GNU/Linux as anything other than an underground resistence of shrinking mindshare, and probably stifle most other innovations as well. The Free Software world will likely be looking to China for sanctuary in the near future, which is a situation so loaded with irony it defies imagining, proving once again that fact is orders of magnitude stranger than fiction.
We have about three years before this directive becomes law in Europe. Microsoft may or may not wait those three years before attacking software freedom in America, but we can all be assured that in five years time it will be virtually impossible for us as software programmers to practice our art and our profession in the west, without a patron from one of the major software houses (Microsoft, Apple, IBM).
This isn't the end of the world, but it is the end of a dynamic, innovative industry. This is hardly unprecidented. Poor governance and patents have destroyed and stifled many innovative industries, from the AT&T monopoly that destroyed hundreds of competing phone companies and froze the technology solid for sixty-plus years, to aviation, to chemistry, to biogenetics and medicine, and so on and so forth. Now its our turn, and we didn't stand up soon enough or speak loudly enough. Well, some of us did, but we were too few and too late.
So I ask again, where can we go? What countries are left that have not fallen beneath the Microsoft/IBM/Sun regime of software patents, and how long can we reasonably expect them to hold out against Americas wonton aggression in forcing our corporate interests down the world's collective throat?
Has China truly become our last, best hope for freedom?
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
There was no vote. On 2004/05/18, the countries then constituting the coucil had to pass their voting intentions, but an A-item means these voting intentions get counted as votes. Even if the composition of the council (10 new member states), the voting weights required for a majority, and the positions of the countries involved have changed so there is no more majority. This was why the EU parliament, backed by ES, NL, PL, DK, DE parliaments formally asked a restart of the process.
In today's council meeting, at least DK, PL and PT formally asked for rediscussing the directive as a B-item. There were critical comments from several other countries.
B-item means reopening discussion, and a formal vote.
Now for the audio:
http://mm.ffii.org/ConsAudio050307En
Note that the audio breaks off when Dutch minister Brinkhorst starts speaking. At that point, the link from the council to the press room was suddenly broken. Noone has his speech, not even the council administration, it seems.
And about audio quality: please keep in mind we had to get feed the audio signal through a GSM cell phone. This is the best streaming (!) solution we could get without an internet connection.
I'm not a citizen of a European country. My signature on that document means nothing, no matter how much I agree.
The EU as is is totally undemcratic, therefore you oppose a proposal to change it? I know this is the logic a lot of people use, but I don't understand it.
What I want to know is whether or not the constitution gives more power to the parliament. The parliament is apparently the body we (grassroots, minor busninesses, economicians) can influence. The closed and undemocratic bodies of the Commision and Council are in the hands of ip lawyers and multinationals.
If the parliament is strengthed, I'll vore for the constitution. If it is weakened, I'll vote against.
1. Follow the Latest News at http://ffii.org (it tends to be the first place news comes out and is comprehensive).
2. Sign the various petitons (e.g., Thank Poland).
3. Lobby your own MP and MEP (spamming all MPs / MEPs is likely to get you ignored).
4. Write to the media with your concerns (e.g., the UK is thinking about a Computer Tax to replace TV licensing - front page Times last week. Can the Software Patents "Software Tax" make the front page too?)
Rather than being evil, Corporations provide a strong legal framework and represent one of the highest achievements of modern sophisticated society.
That's an excellent argument. Unfortunately, it sounds very much like the star-eyed idealism that makes communism sound good: "If we all work together, one for another, we can achieve great things." Looks good on paper, but it falls apart under the shear force am individual greed and selfishness.
Corporations as a charter granted by the people to perform specific tasks are good. Corporations with equal rights as individuals are bad. Like Frankenstein's monster, corporations have turned on those they were built to serve. How have they turned on us? Corporations make up the largest single block of money funding lobbyists and politicians. It is well-documented that the politician who spends the most money is most likely to get elected.
So, figure it out. Corporations and individuals representing corporations contribute the most money to political campaigns. And they don't do it simply because they want a particular candidate to win: they do it so that their particular candidate will win, and owe them a favor.
See this for more information. There's a lot more out there, too. Corporations in their current form are not the pinnacle of civilisation; they are a threat to democracy and liberty. Until we have divested them of their current legal status as protected individuals, and returned them to their former status as chartered entities, corporations, by their actions, tend to be evil.
(No, not all corporations are evil. But many tend to evil, such as those self-same airplane manufacturers, Starbucks, the pharmacuetical companies, the oil companies, and Wal*Mart.)
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
Before 1913, our Senators were elected by our state legistatures. This produced Senators that were nigh untouchable, and their job was just another rung on the politican's ladder. All their parties had to do was demagogue national-level concerns to keep the state voters in line and they could keep their man in power. Finally we had to amend our own Constitution to do something about it, oh, only about 120 years after it was created in the first place (Amendment XVII). Something like this can last a long time.
I'm not writing to gloat, merely to inform. From my standpoint, unelected legislators are never a good idea. If you must have two legislative houses in the EU, better to have an upper and a lower house where both are popularly elected. If I lived over there I would vote against any Constitution that featured an unelected body.
In other words, only vote yes for the consitution if you think this is the way the EU needs to be governed for the next couple of centuries. If you need more to feel happy with the EU, vote no. I guess.
Crap...
Let me just say that those of you that think that the fact this only means that the directive is now sent to parliament is any consolation... Think again!
They are NOT going to back down just because a couple of thousand geeks want them to.
The problem is, even if the open source development takes a dive into the underground, and software gets developed without a license and hosted on obscure ftp servers or encrypted BitTorrents, what will it really matter.
If developers can't create and sell their software or services without having to spend thousands of euros every month to check whether there are any prior patents, any independent development is dead in the water.
And sadly just when it started to get interesting (not a coincidence)...
Personally I gave up developing independently, commercially a few years ago. I'm now developing in house applications for a large industrial cooperation. I wonder how the in house development is going to be governed. We hardly buy any software; everything is developed by a team of developers. I don't see it happening that we will pay for the right to create our own 'clickable command buttons' and other bizarre patents.
Hell, we'd probably need to start by patenting all the stuff we made already, not to sell or license it, but just to protect ourselves from other guys who probably thought of the same stuff.
When will people learn that there is no reason why 10 or 100 or 1000 people couldn't come up with the exact same idea at the same time?
It's just so ridiculous.
nah, that would be
- du n-dun-dun(ad-libitum , crescendo)
duun-dun (pause) duuun-dun (pause) duuun-dun (pause)
dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun-dun
Ciao, Renato
Both the Parliament and the Council are strengthened. And the strengthening of the EP only makes them as strong as they in this particular directive process (codecision) in several other cases. Which means: still easily ignored by both the Commission and Council, with as only weapon to kill a directive process (but still very disadvantaged when it comes to changing the text of a directive).
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Oddly enough, I agree with you. I think in the long run the countries that are not shackled by crap like this will be the ones who win the technology race. Innovation is asphyxiating tech in the US, and now the EU is going to draw thier last breath... The PRC will march right on by us. :-(
Murphy was an optimist.
If you think Bendtsen is an idiot presently, try reading this: Minutes, meeting of the Folketing's EU Affairs Committee, June 23 2004. Bendtsen is just about the most arrogantly ignorant idiot you can imagine, and this really shows him off as what he is. Note his condescending tone...
In response to the several posters who have urged me to vote "Yes" because, in their estimation, a vote against the new treaty merely supports the undemocratic nature of the EU, I can only say that they obviously have not read the treaty text.
The "new EU" is by no means any more democratic than the present. In fact, it retains the current system whereby the unelected council dominates the political process. Since it also takes away veto rights of individual (democratically-elected) national parliaments, I consider it a step backwards for democracy in the EU. The present mess has only convinced me that it is a proud and noble thing to vote "No".
- Peter Ravn Rasmussen
Currently, the 'blood of patriots' is worth something less than a hundred dollars on the open markent, and with your spare change you can purchase the integrity and immortal souls of every member of congress. The war is over, and we, the 'have-nots', have been roundly defeated.
However, all is not lost. In order to prevent any sort of cohesive resistance, the powers that be have elected to maintain a plentiful supply of beer at reasonable prices, and insure that you can get 200 channels of daytime television for a reasonable monthly fee. Sit back, watch another MASH re-run, and have a cold one mate. Cheers!