Slashdot Mirror
British Government Comes Out Against 'Pure' Software Patents
uglyduckling writes "The British Government has issued a response to a recent petition calling for 'the Prime Minister to make software patents clearly unenforcible'. The answer is reassuring but perhaps doesn't go far enough, and gives no specific promises to bring into line a patent office that grants software patents (according to the petition) 'against the letter and the spirit of the law'. The Gowers Review that it references gives detailed insight into the current British position on this debate, most interestingly recommending a policy of 'not extending patent rights beyond their present limits within the
areas of software, business methods and genes.'"
There are a number of other petitions on the same site that might be of interest to slashdotters:
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/OpenDocument/ - petition for opendocument to be used by the british government.
http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/teach-oss - petition for teaching in schools to be vendor neutral, instead of promoting microsoft products
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Dont expect too much of the petition system.
There was a very well publicised petition on the new proposed road charging system that got 1.7million supporting votes cast, it had little noticible effect on the goverment. Infact all it caused was alot of publicity and condemnation in the Labour ranks that some 'prat' (direct quote) had created this tool that could be used to bash them.
To put it in perspective the whole population in the UK is 60million in total, so 1.7million is ALOT of the driving adults.
see
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/magazine/6354735.stm
I think Labour saw it as a exercise in good relations and checking the boxes. Certainly there is no sign of them doing anything about the petitions that people actually support.
Basically, the Patent office does permit some software patents. Say, for example, you managed to find a way to improve the efficiency and power of an engine in a novel way, simply by adjusting the timing in software in a novel way. This would be a software patent, but becazuse the effect is on a physical piece of equipment, it would be patentable.
Of course, this can be extended to much more murky cases. For example, a compression mechanism may effectively increase speed and/or capacity of a hard disk. But it's not possible to extend it into doing exactly the same thing in a different way.
"The Government remains committed to its policy that no patents should exist for inventions which make advances lying solely in the field of software."
That seems pretty clear to me. Why is everyone moaning about this being vague?
"Although certain jurisdictions, such as the US, allow more liberal patenting of software-based inventions, these patents cannot be enforced in the UK."
If anyone was thinking about starting a GNU/GPL project on something patented then find someone British to be your front man. Open Source patents problem solved.... for now.
The way european democracy works is that if the non-elected european commission chooses to have SW patents after some hollidays sponsored by big american SW compagnies, all the european countries will have to implement them fast or be fined.
actually, it not that bad: the European Parliament has to agree, and recently it has been possible to stop some very harmful legislation despite a strong push (for it) by the European Commission. The SW-Patent directive has been stopped, IPRED2 has been held up, and EPLA (the last attempt to legalize SW patents and, at the same time, remove them from the reach of national and European legislation) may still be averted. The point is: democracy can work, if citizens are active and alert! even if institutions with very indirect democratic control/legitimation like the commission have too much to say.The original US patent (5,440,676) that opened the door to patenting software was for an anti-aliasing feature in an oscilloscope display. Because it was shown that it could have been done in software or hardware, but the result was a physical mechanism, the patent was allowed. Once the foot was in the door, everyone just started adding boilerplate "device is an electronic computer comprising software to do X" and the battle was over.
Anyway, the original was on a device, not pure software. UK believes that they can enforce the same rule that the US PTO failed to enforce.
Intron: the portion of DNA which expresses nothing useful.
I would really like to be able to tear you a new one for such an absurd mis-characterization of how the EU is governed. Unfortunately, it is not at all far from the truth. The system is rigged so that the council in practice have far more power than the parliament.
It works something like this:
The Council puts together a directive for parliament to vote on.
The Parliament rejects or greatly amends the directive.
The Council resubmits the original directive verbatim or with some cosmetic changes.
And here's where democracy falls down the rabbit hole; The second time around, the parliament needs a majority of all MEPs, present or not, to reject the councils bill or to push through any of their own amendments. Every single abstention or absentee is counted as voting with the council. With the average percentage of MEPs actually present to vote, this means that something along the lines of 75-80% of all the MEPs must oppose the directive, or the council has it's way. That type of near unanimity is rare, so in practice the Council can push through most directives.Not only that, but in this second reading the parliament cannot introduce any new amendments, only reaffirm those from the previous reading.
If you are anything like me, this information will give you a rather uncomfortable feeling about the democratic nature of the EU.
The original US patent (5,440,676) that opened the door to patenting software...
That's bogus information. Software patents go back much further than that. The first software patent was filed in 1965, issued in 1968, and expired in 1981. It's Martin Goetz's U.S. "Sorting System", Patent #3,380,029, the sorting algorithm that broke the O(N log N) barrier. That's the technology behind SyncSort, and it powered mainframe sorting for a generation.