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Elect NoSoftwarePatents as European Of The Year
Aargh writes "Every year a public Internet poll is taken to vote for, amongst others, the "European of the Year". This year, the founder of NoSoftwarePatents.com has been selected as a candidate. Taken from the NoSoftwarePatents.com site: "We now have a first-rate opportunity to make political leaders, media and citizens all over the world realize the significance of our cause. Please give us your vote, and help us gain more votes, so that the founder of the NoSoftwarePatents campaign be elected as the new 'European of the Year'." Non-europeans can also vote, so why dont we unleash the slashdot hordes?" Mr. Mueller had been exchanging e-mails recently on this subject; thanks to an introduction from Kaj Arnö. I truly do think that given his, and the organization's work that they deserve to win. Check out the celebrity endorsements as well. *grin* Also, worth reading their voting guide if you are going to vote.
I'll just do what slashdot tells me to and vote anyway!1!
Many of the voting recommendations have more to do with politics than patents; when it has little to do with patents, it might be worth disobeying the recommendations in order to make a real vote, rather than simply boosting an arbitary choice.
I wish in fact that NoSoftwarePatents.com had made no recommendation when the was no patent-related issues for that candidate. Such block-voting recommendations also make it easier for people to write this kind of idiocy.
Wikileaks, no DNS
As the voting form requires to vote for all categories it is not a good thing to do this if you have no clue who all these people are. Even I, as a overaddict news consuming European, have no clue what to choose for most of the categories because here in Europe news sources are mostly nation minded and therefore very fragmented.
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
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You know, thsi reminds me of old joke...
:P
School teachear giving homework: "children, please write who's your idol, and why Lenin"
Luckily the background isn't the same
One that hath name thou can not otter
Why doesn't someone write a greasemonkey script to mark all these votes ?
:D
Then I can install it, click Vote and be done about it
Or on the other hand, I could read up on who all these people are before voting. NOT !!!
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
The form requires one to place a vote in all categories, even if I don't know who the people are or if I support none of them. This quite simply bullshit. To support one candidate I'll have support others I care none for.
This is supposed to be politics. This is supposed to mean somthing! How can they err on such a simple thing as a flawed system of voting when it is the foundation of democracy?
All rites reversed 2010
It was a tough choice between Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the no software patent guy.
Voted for Florian though because I think that is the best choice for a more free economy.
This is the sig that says NI (again)
poll in association with Microsoft.
Imagine some bobo from MS handing over the prize to the guy from NoSoftwarePatents.
(I know the organisation would let it come to that, but Microsoft would still be on all the promo material, press releases,...)
please read their recommandations on their voting guide. The recommandations are sensible and argumented, and when they don't want to choose (business leader of the year) they generate a random choice. I found it quite funny.
The issue is important.
I can't say that I agree with the idea to remove software patents. Where I can see that copyright will protect your program, what if its a novel idea in software design that you want to patent? It seems to me that copyrights protect individual works, but patents protect novel ideas and inventions. Perhaps what needs to be done is not to eliminate software patents, but re-define the borders of what is granted a patent and what isn't, and make it more difficult to obtain erroneous patents.
-Da3vid-
Astroturfing is when you *fake* a grassroots campaign, by, say, having your paid employees pretend to be consumers, or having setting up lots of pseudonyms on a web forum in order that one person pretends to be 20 disgruntled/satisfied customers or whatever.
In this case, we're a bunch of geeks who are being urged to vote for someone who most of us probably happen to agree with.
Organising a campaign isn't the same as faking a campaign.
The kind of idiocy written by those in favour of software patents has nothing to do with block votes. It has to do with money, lots and lots of money, and the surprising effect this has on "journalists". Calling the FFII "communists" is a strange attack but then you have to realise that the author is Polish, and the Polish MEPs were one of the most single-minded blocks to vote against software patents.
Software patents are being pushed hard by a rich, powerful, and ammoral machine built from lawyers, lobbyists, and large misguided software firms that have been beguiled by the arms race.
Voting for Florian will send a strong signal that software patents are not a popular legal innovation but are rightly seen as a threat to the free market and open capitalism.
My blog
The No Software Patents site says that copyright should cover everything that patents cover, and elsewhere that patents are used as guns against small software developers. Um, and copyrights AREN'T used this way? C'mon. If patents disappeared tomorrow, the lawyers would find a way of crushing you with copyrights, and you'd have a No Software Copyrights! movement in a minute.
The problem is not with the protection of ideas, but with the execution of that protection in the business world. Maybe 20 years is an inappropriate length for a patent in software; maybe two years would be better. Perhaps patent and copyright duration should be scaled based on the industry, or adjusted based on the commercialization/profit of the IP holder. There are other ways of dealing with this besides chucking the whole system.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Patents don't "protect" novel ideas, they *prevent* ideas from being used for the benefit of society. They are evil and harmful, the only saving grace for patents is that secrecy may be even more harmful than a time limited patent.
To defend software patents, you must find a software patent that has expired, is useful today, and is unlikely to have been invented independently during the patent period.
The more sophisticated amoung us see the issue of software patents as one of the artificial creation of monopolies and the unneccessary restriction of freedom, but from the pure propertarian perspective, this can look a lot like the slogan "property is theft". Lawyers know how complex a concept property is, but the average person, and it seems the average politician doesn't know this, and hear opposition as simple "rationalisation".
Wikileaks, no DNS
It's true that the Polish government was extremely helpful. However, the Polish candidate for Statesman of the Year wasn't helpful at all. He's the president, but all of the help came from the executive government, which is headed by the prime minister (at the time that was Marek Belka), and mostly from deputy minister Wlodzimierz Marcinski. We discussed the voting recommendations with our Polish activists who are quite familiar with how the decisions were taken within the Polish government.
It's not just about whether we win, it's also how we win. We want to involve large parts of the community in this, and we hope to send a really strong message to Brussels (the de-facto capital of the EU). They should see our numerical strength and campaigning power once again. Unfortunately, the software patent issue hasn't been resolved for good in Europe, and it will resurface on the political agenda sooner or later. By winning this poll, we increase our chances of winning future battles. Publicity is an important way to influence politics.
Let's all be good little Asimov robots and obey the leader, er, Slashdot. I, for one, welcome our new moderator overlords...
As for Hirsi Ali's party, the VVD pushed for software patents like hardly any other political party in Europe. The whole directive project was started by Frits Bolkestein. On 1 July 2004, all of the Dutch parliament except for the VVD group supported a resolution that the Dutch government should retract its support to the EU Council's pro-patent proposal. And Toine Manders was a driving pro-patent force in the ALDE (Alliance of Liberals and Democrats in Europe) group in the Europan Parliament. It was only toward the end of the process that he was burned out and (probably because Philips also wanted this) introduced a motion for rejection of the entire bill. On the day before the vote, I met him in an elevator in the European Parliament and we actually had a friendly discussion because we all wanted to go for rejection of the proposal, but let's face it: He's an intellectual property lawyer by profession, and he didn't call for rejection because he was against software patents. He just realized that his camp couldn't get its way, and then they decided to abort the process, which was perfectly fine with me.
It's true that I support Blizzard's position on bnetd. That doesn't mean that I'm "an outspoken proponent of the DMCA" (because the bnetd case is one very specific case), nor that I believe "that video game makers should be able to control the experience and where and how the game is used, through technical means backed by the force of law". Those are out-of-context statements and unreasonable interpretations of what I said in the bnetd context.
It's a matter of fact that I'v ebeen living off intellectual-property rights, mostly copyright (and to some extent trademarks, but never patents), for 20 years. I started at age 15 as an author of articles for computer magazines, and a year later became a computer book author, and I wrote computer programs. I interrupted a game development project to fight against software patents, and after my book on the software patent story is out the door, I'll resume that project.
The only way to succeed politically against software patents is to have a pro-author's rights position. That's the basis on which I was able to win some politicians over who weren't on our side before (especially on the right wing). An anti-IP fundamentalism is counterproductive. The net effect of taking a radical anti-IP position is that politicians don't even meet with you, parliamentary committees don't invite you to their hearings, and you can rant but you can't influence legislation. Look at the process concerning the Patent Reform Act in the US: Those who take too much of an anti-IP position aren't listened to. Politicians view this as a matter of economic policy for the most part, not a question of idealism.
As for the bnetd case, I'm absolutely pro-interoperability when it comes to exchanging documents between different computer systems. Where I think one has to be careful about an interoperability privilege is any client-server setting. There are situations in which I believe it's legitimate for an author to reserve certain rights. Also, I can't see that it's reasonable to claim that interoperability is important between the client and the server component of a computer game, especially not when the primary effect of such interference is that a copyright-protection scheme is broken (and thereby a business model that is much more in the interest of consumers than those subscription models where you pay every month, or copy protection by dint of errors on a medium that are checked for). Also, I know that the Blizzard guys are gamers themselves. I worked with them as a consultant and representative from 1995 to 1998. You can find my name in the credits of WarCraft II and StarCraft (provided that you haven't installed Brood War, a project in which I was no longer involved).
That's my position. If you find someone on the ballot who's not only anti-swpat but also anti-copyright, go and vote for him, but you won't find any because people with that attitude don't make much political headway. Please also read the endorsements that I received from RMS, Tim O'Reilly, Alan Cox, Rasmus Lerdorf and Monty Widenius. RMS and Tim O'Reilly discussed some of those copyright-related issues with me by email, and there are differences between their positions and mine that we're well aware of, but the endorsements relate to the fact that I'm running on a NoSoftwarePatents.com ticket, and that's the message that this is about. It's not about YesToCopyright or whatever else. I'm not going to be elected president and then have power to do lots of things. I was just nominated as a figurehead of the NoSoftwarePatents movement, so I hope I can count on your support.
U2 advertised this poll on the main page of its website last month, and so did various U2 fan sites. The publisher of the European Voice (the weekly newspaper that stands for the "EV" in "EV50") told me that there have been large-scale campaigns from the very first year of the EV50 awards (2001). It's perfectly legit, and we're going to win this thanks to the overwhelming support we've received from key people, large organzations, and major websites.
Claiming that I returned when we were on the winning track is the opposite of what happened. On June 20, the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament voted on the software patent directive, and many essential amendments to the proposed bill (in order to exclude software from the scope of patentable subject matter) fell through. When the members of the committee voted at the end whether the parliament should accept or reject the bill (accepting meaning that it would still have gone back to the EU Council and possibly to conciliation), 16 voted for and only 10 against the proposal.
In that precarious situation, a group of companies actually did provide the kind of support that I became involved again for the last two weeks before the plenary vote. Like in almost all parliaments, it's the plenary that takes the actual decision, and the committee sort of prepares the plenary vote (in some parliaments, if the committee decides in a certain way, it's practically a done deal because people in the plenary just take the official party position, but in the European Parliament, the plenary may still decide differently).
I didn't position myself as the leader of our movement in the European Parliament at that stage. I took some initiatives and met various politicians and aides, and the FFII was really in charge.
Someone is not a "glory hog" because several independent juries nominate him for certain awards and honors. There's some information on those awards and honors toward the bottom of my backgrounder page on the NoSoftwarePatents.com site, and especially about how I personally view those nominations. I also explained that at great length in an email that the FFII sent out to all of its registered supporters.