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EU Says No To Software Patents
Moggie68 writes "European parliament has . struck down the proposal for a directive that would have brought US-style software patents into EU." Here's another story on the decision.
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Ok so the current score is 1-0 to the good guys, but I'm pretty sure the game isn't over yet...
Underholdning.info
Congratulations to the http://www.ffii.org/ and all the European citizens!
:)
Today we're a bit closer to freedom
May the source be with you!
Congratulations to the FFII for all their hard work and patience campaigning against the directive!!! These people deserve all the support they can get.
For the time being I can rest assured that working as a programmer I do not have to watch my every statement.
Coca-Cola, sometimes War.
From the article on BBC:
Responding to the rejection the European Commission said it would not draw up or submit any more versions of the original proposal. .
Sounds like excellent news, but I doubt they'll give it up just yet, but this is a major setback (another one) for them.
Personally my only problem with software patents is the length. I think that an 18-36 month patent is reasonable but anything over that is not.
Today was a great day in the battle for a free and open information infrastructure, and for a favorable business environment in Europe for enterprises that use or produce software.
Not just that, but it was a great day for European democracy, with the EU's elected body asserting itself totally over the unelected, untransparent Council.
May be true, from the BBC: ... as before, which means different interpretations as to what is patentable, without any judiciary control by the European Court of Justice," said EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner, representing the EU head office at the vote.
"Patents will continue to be handled by national patent offices
At least it shows that politicans do not just blindly follow. If this continues, it will be difficult for national politicans to accept something the EU has rejected (more than once, this was a re-write wasn't it?)
One very good outcome of this is that the average European Joe Schmoe is now more aware of the issue and the MEPs are more aware of the sentiments within the industry. No more will the pro-patent lobby be able to sneak software patents in through the back door. That, in itself, is a huge victory.
A huge thanks to everybody who helped defeat the directive, be it with a single short e-mail to an MEP or actively spending hundreds of hours on the issue.
Thank you!
Lemon curry???
Yes, I would urge caution in seeing this as a victory for the anti-patent side. It is clear that the pro-patent side was willing to see this bill killed off rather that have the FFII's amendments voted into law.
The patent lobbyists will be back, if not in the EU then in every national parliament. Congratulations to the FFII, in stopping this and putting the spotlight on the software patent issue. It's a huge achievement.But this is only the first battle.
It's worth a lot of money to Microsoft and front organisations like the BSA to shut down competition using patents, hopefully with the issue now more widely known they will find it increasingly difficult to spread lies and buy off politicians.
This is almost a total victory for the opponents of software patents.
It's good news, but I wouldn't count on the enemies of technology giving up. Software patents will be introduced in the EU parliament again and again, until they get passed. Don't underestimate the patience of bureacrats and corporations.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
This isn't a "victory over patents", it just means that the situation isn't resolved.
EPO (the European Patent Office) still have given out several thousands patents for software (and they continue to do so). These are not void until they are tried individually in court.
Så, basically there could be three results:
1. The directive was accepted with the possibility of software patents (which would be preferred for pro-patent-people)
2. The directive was accepted without the possibility of software patents (which would be preferred for con-patent-people)
3. The directive was dropped
The latter is the case. So there are no general guidelines. Of course this still means that bunch of patents wouldn't hold in court, but that road is much longer than a general guideline preventing the patents in the first place.
- Peter Brodersen; professional nerd
In order to compete with Europe, I think "harmonization" with their patent policies is exactly what we should be fighting for now.
The EPO (European Patent Office) has granted patents on algorithms for years, despite the fact that they are illegal under the current European legislation. And it seems that the fight will go on there (cf. this article).
However, considering today's vote, the patent offices can not anymore claim that their interpretation of the law have a political backup.
--Go Debian!
It will takes years before the EU commission can get a new software patents law to the EU parliament. The EU bureaucracy is slow (since it has to negotiate between so many different countries). They will probably try, but for now, the EU is safe for at least two-three years before the fight has to be fought again.
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
Problem with amending a bad proposal to make it better is that you never know which amendments will pass and the outcome is very likely to be hard to interpret and illogical at best.
Hopefully the next proposal which is going to happen sooner or later is better from the beginning. I hope that in next time, SME's and OSS-community are represented when the initial drafts for the directive are made.
This time the rejection of the whole proposal was better than amending it into lawyers' wet dream.
Everyone needs to be aware of these facts. Every news story about these events should make it clear that this is not a total victory for the anti-pure-software-patent crowd.
Microsoft, Nokia and co will try again, in a few years time. Except that they won't do anything as overt as trying to pass a pan-European directive. They'll work quitely, behind the scenes, on the ministers of individual European governments. Pure-software-patents will be legalised, once country at a time.
Once this process is complete, they may then go for another pan-European directive, that really would merely 'harmonise' the EU countries' patent laws. Only by then, it will be to late, since the damage will have already been done at the level of individual countries.
Don't let it get that far. Keep your ears open and stay on the lookout for any pro-pure-software-patent legislation that may reach your parliament.
#include
"This isn't 1940 where computers are simply solving math problems."
:
This is possibly the most idiotic statement I have ever read. In what way is software not entirely a mathematical field? Have you the slightest inkling of what computer science is?
Software, in all its forms, from the highest level Haskell to the tightest x86 machine code, from the elegance of Scheme to the pure sickness of Befunge, is represented as regular groups of symbols encoded in a numerical form. The abstract machines that give meaning to these symbols can also be encoded in any of these forms . The presence of hardware is incidental : everything that has been done or can be done with software is performable by a purely mental process. How anyone can believe this does not qualify as a field of pure mathematics is beyond me.
In summary, you don't have a clue what you are talking about. I think a better statement might be
"This isn't 3000BC where mathematics is simply solving mathematics problems."
The emphasised phrase is legally and semantically meaningless in the context of deciding whether a patent should pass review. It is nothing more than a lawyerly weasel-phrase used to slip pure software patents under the radar.
The 2001 consultation was a complete sham, little more than a pro-pure-software-patent PR exercise. This has been widely discussed on anti-software-patent forums.
See http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=154904&cid=12
The only sad thing is the feeling of surprise this generated...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Here is the slightly worrying meat of the matter (from TFA):
So it seems that the bill was not voted down because the anti-SWPAT people were able to persuade the voters of the rightness of their cause, but that it was spammed with amendments until it collapsed under its own weight.
Still a good thing, of course, but it would have been nicer to have this stupid idea explicitly faced down.
--
What short sigs we have -
One hundred and twenty chars!
Too short for haiku.
You clearly have no idea what mathematics is.
Do you think that all of maths is simple arithmetic? I hope you realise that apply is a mathematical operator : this is what you would refer to as "calling a method". Defining a function is an equation. Do I really have to spell it out for you? Everything in your programs is mathematical. Not necessarily arithmetical. Please learn the difference.
Practically all programming language semantic research is couched in the terms of category or set theory. That you don't know this doesn't mean it isn't so. Look it up if you have more than a passing interest in your career.
When a patent claims something like the "method of drag and drop", it is claiming that all possible symbolic forms that implement this method are infringing. These forms, like every program you have ever written, are mathematical. The big issue is that the form is not being claimed as in a copyrighted work or a physical patent: it is the very concept of solving the problem that is being claimed. Once you have spotted a problem, you immediately control all possible solutions.
And the guy with the biggest Nuclear bombs still feels he has God on his side.
A major battle is over but the war is continuing.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
I just can't imagine them giving up so soon. As has been stated even before this vote, they will go after more local governments next. Following that, what is to stop them from trying it again later? (Is there some rule that says they can't?)
As for the US needing patent reform? Yeah, it's pretty clear to "us" from our perspective, but the average joe doesn't care one way or the other but the moment they hear "they are trying to stop us from patenting things" the public will conjure up images of Ben Franklin and Thomas Edison tinkering in their home laboratories and think how un-American it would be to prevent people from patenting stuff. It has to be shown how it hurts them before the public will care about this and telling them "hey, you could have had much cooler and cheaper stuff..." it's a particularly effective argument since it's essentially viewed as speculation rather than fact.
It's easier to see in Europe what the potential harm to their market would be -- the U.S.'s head start in patent portfolios would make the sting pretty obvious.
So then I wonder, what angle or spin would be most effective against the general public to help them understand the need for patent reform in the U.S.?
I'd like to know the names of those few who voted YES.
Democracy is not about votes, but about influence. It doesn't matter if everyone can vote if the vote doesn't mean anything, or if how people vote is largely influenced by the funding available to the various candidates, or if the election system is biased towards certain candidates.
The election system is the first flaw - by penalising votes for outsiders it creates an entrenched situation where only very rich people (i.e. Ross Perot) or the two major parties have a fighting chance of winning. That in itself means that even if the majority of Americans in advance of the next election wanted a major change, and a candidate matched what they wanted, that candidate would be unlikely to stand a chance because most voters would see it as too risky.
The funding available has a similar level of importance - remember the level of support Perot was able to get? It was a direct result of having access to funding that enabled him to reach a large audience. Try picking a random candidate from the last two elections and asking people on the street if they know who he/she was, and most of them won't know. That means that effectively, the office of President is closed to anyone not palatable to a majority in one of the major parties, or wealthy enough for a major PR blitz.
It's tragic that so many people believe blindly in a system just because they are a allowed a vote. People were allowed to vote under Saddam Hussein as well, and we all know - regardless of whether or not we support the war - that those votes were worthless. No other comparisons intended - just an example of how being allowed to vote says nothing about whether or not a country is democratic.
That said, at the moment I live in the UK, which has an election system about as shitty as the US one (i.e. Labour holds an absolute majority in parliament despite not getting anywhere near the majority of votes, thanks to one man circuits), as does France and a number of other European countries, most of the above apply in varying degress to many other countries as well.
Please would you post some of your mythical non-maths based code? I have a feeling you are beyond help.
A pure mental process that is based on consistent symbolic manipulation is extremely difficult to paint as anything but maths. What do you think it is ? Interpretive dance? Woodcraft?
I would love to know what you believe mathematics is. I'm guessing that you think it is arithmetic.
And as to your MS : the standards for getting a degree in this field are shockingly bad. I know people with even less clue than you who have degrees in CS. I have one too, but I don't think that it alone proves anything. Your statements show that you are very confused.
You are a real nutcase.
If I have the rules to the machine, abstract or physical, and I have the code, then I can laboriously perform the instructions. Are you seriously denying that this is the case? Can you imagine doing one instruction?
push 20h
Can you imagine doing the next one?
call 401010
Oh look, by induction, you can imagine performing the whole program. Big fucking surprise.
I never said it would be easy or fun, or that it would finish in a single lifetime. But clearly it can be performed as a mental process.
On to planes. Planes, and all other mechanical devices, work because they obey physical "laws". These laws are mathematical generalisations that we have tested against the world for a long time and failed to disprove. The maths does not generate the laws, it is merely a statement about them. That we can use the maths to design other physical items does not mean that these items are suddenly pure maths. They simply obey the same "constant conjunctions" that we have observed for everything else in the physical world. Read some Hume, ingrate.
Your logical fallacies are unbeatable. Keep it up.
"to get away from the 1s and 0s that are actually doing the calculations."
So you really do beleive that mathematics is just arithmetic. I think this is where the disconnect is: mathematics is by its very nature the process of abstraction that you use to get away from any other representation you already have. It is not just adding and dividing, or other simple operators you learned when you were two.
Look up some fields of more abstract maths: category theory, topography, etc. Are you going to advocate promoting a small field of discrete maths to being "not maths" merely because we can make machines to perform that maths easily? Or that some people who use the machines don't understand them? If so, then arithmetic is not maths, because a lot of people use calculators, and don't know how to divide numbers without one.
Long live innovation through competition - not litigation.
I produce roughly 20000-25000 lines of code every 4-5 months, and I hate the thought that I can be accused of stealing someone elses idea every time I write 10-20 lines code - in fact it insults me. Lets hope europe will some day move to illigalize software patent on a national level. I want fredom to develop thank you! Not this thing the pro-patent politicians call "protection". It only protects big companies with big patentportfolios from having to compete by way of building the best products.