Richard Stallman on EU Software Patents

schreibmaschine writes "Richard Stallman writes in The Guardian that the defeat of the EU directive has bought time, but that the pro-patent forces will regroup and try again."

Comments

Away from tech

[gowen]

Our years-long fight has shown how undemocratic the EU is. It is a system in which bureaucrats can make decisions that, practically speaking, the public can never reverse.

Software patents aside, this is a really crucial point. Every anti-EU politician in Europe should be hammering on this point (using Software Patents as an example), and on the fact that corruption is so widespread that the EU's own auditors have refused to sign off on the accounts for year after year.

Re:Interesting article from RMS

[Lifewish]

The Ministers (nominated by their countries) form a Council. This Council produces directives which are then passed to the Parliament (made up of elected MEPs) for ratification (or whatever else they choose to do with them). A directive is, if I understand correctly, roughly equivalent to a US "Bill" - it's a chunk of suggested legislation, which all countries in the EU would then be required to implement in their legislation.

In this particular case, the Council drafted a universally-loathed directive to legalise software patents. The Parliament made changes and sent it back. The Council stripped out the changes. A rapporteur (negotiator) was appointed; the Council ignored his suggestions completely. The Council refused to actually discuss it despite being legally required to (some of the members of the Council had been told off by their national parliaments and required to change it). Eventually the Parliament threw it out completely.

FFII web site taken down

[alanxyzzy]

IN related news, this ZDNet article reports that the German software company Nutzwerk has obtained a court order taking the FFII's web site offline.

In the meantime, please use nosoftwarepatents.com instead, where you will find more information on the issue.

Keep it up RMS!

[LibrePensador]

Stallman exemplifies that old adage that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance or something to that effect.

For all the BS he often gets from the newly-lobotomized Microsoft "ain't that bad" and "Apple's so cool that we must lick its DRM" crowd, he has much respect for consistently fighting the good fight, which is something that is rare to find in these funny times when people gloat about not believing or standing up for anything.

Re:The world did just fine before their invention

[ZephyrXero]

Agreed, patents aren't really a bad idea in theory... it's in practice that they've become a problem.

Quick and easy ways to solve current patent issues:
1. Make patents only last for around 10 years. This gives the inventor more than enough time to establish themselves as the original.
2. Make corporations have to pay much more than an actual person would be charged to file.
3. Any person or business that files over 5 patents in one year has their filing fees raised expotentially with each subsequent submission.
4. Don't allow patents on concepts and ideas, only something that's actually been produced already.

These won't fix everything, but it's a good start and woulnd't be hard at all to implement. Getting the guys in charge to listen however, is a very different story...

Re:EU constitution would have been an improvement

[o'reor]

Indeed, the EU law is already binding on member states, but I have to disagree with you and share the views of RMS on that point : the new constitutional project would have made the EU less democratic and (even) more corporate-driven than it currently is.

With this text, although the EU parliament would have had the power to oppose decisions taken by the EU Council of ministers, the decisions would have been as messy to take or to oppose as with the current EU software, since this directive project was already being discussed in co-decision -- the way nearly every directive would have been, had the text been approved. As we have all seen with the software patents directive, there was still plenty of room for sneaky things to be done by the Council and the Commission to push the agenda of the European Patents Office against the will of the Parliament, and as RMS says, even though the Parliament rubbed their noses this time, they will surely be back with a revenge.

However, if the constitutional treaty had been voted in, the Commission and the Council would have had even more powers; the Commission could have taken "european decisions" (the equivalent of directives, that have force of law) on its own, without any possible democratic check and balance over these : not even the EU Council would have a say on that.

Finally, let us not forget that the inherent flaw of the current EU institutions is that the Council of Ministers has the legislative power at the european scale, and the same ministers apply these european laws using their executive power at the national scale. This is already in contradiction with the principles of separation of powers.

So sure, it will be a while until the EU gathers again around a constitution project. But I think that voting against this one was the right thing to do -- and I for one did it.