Slashdot Mirror
Software Patent Debate Over in Europe For Now?
Anonymous EPA writes "The website of the European Patent Office is running a story about a recent agreement not to revive the debate on software patents in Europe nor to promote new legislation. To quote: 'All speakers welcomed unequivocally the opportunity to discuss the issue at a high level and made clear that a new CII (computer-implemented inventions) debate followed by legal modifications was neither necessary nor desirable.'"
Looks like a small bit of sanity is left in this universe ... Go EU !
The sum of intelligence on a planet is constant. Nowadays we have more people. When classic goes away, so do I. Copy
Who's to say software patents won't be needed in the future though, as the software industry changes?
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
One of the reasons for this is quite likely that patent owners are afraid of a total ban. As it is now, they can work within national systems and get some patents. If there was an open debate, the evidence from last time is that the anti-patent lobby has by far the better arguments and might end up winning Europe wide anti-patent legislation.
The solution? We just have to work to establish more and more GPLv3 software, written in patent free countries, which uses whatever is the best technique for the job. Eventually patent based countries will not be able to compete effectively.
This, from one of the MEPs:
The US grants too many patents and of too low quality which are cheaper to obtain and often quite trivial.
Is there a chance that the US is stung and works on a quick overhaul of its broken patent system? I, for one, am not holding my breath.
The cynical bastard in me thinks this sounds like they're about to sneak this legislation in as an attachment to some goat herders bill or something.
Maybe the US laws need to be harmonized with those in the EU.
And in line with supporting the parent post: Don't trust these lying, cheating bastards an inch. I normally try to be moderate in my choice of words but in recent years I have been more exposed to what goes on at the 'political' level of British and European society. There's a weird other-wordliness about what happens. At one level, they pay great attention to probity, honesty and decency (most of the time) but what they hide or pretend not to notice (in my view) is that the entire system is *intellectually* corrupt and that it poisons the minds of the people who work in it.
There's an old joke about the former British Prime Minister Harold Wilson who, it goes, falls in a river and cries for help. Two members of the public go to his aid but the three politicians he was with immediately start debating what he means by 'help'. As in Orwell's world, words do not NOT mean what the public think they mean. Nothing as obvious as the made-up words of doublespeak but instead an insidious corruption of the meaning of words to the point where what a normal person would consider to be plain and obviously of one meaning is taken by those inside the system to mean more or less the opposite.
So when they way that they don't intend to have another computer implemented inventions debate, don't believe a word of it. At face value it probably does mean that there won't be a computer implemented inventions debate. But nothing prevents an automaton implemented inventions debate or a computer assisted implementations debate or anything else the sleazy scum decide to come up with. There is a SERIOUS sickness at the heart of modern western politics but unfortunately there is no sign yet that the patient realises he's ill.
... I can assure you this has absolutely nothing to do with common sense or similar. It just means the hole crappy discussion will return with another name, may be something like tiny-little-puppies-petting-act. Don't get me wrong, but, as a German, I know the EU often is abused to bypass national laws, even the constitution (or "Grundgesetz", as we call it in Germany). Politicians actually build laws in Europe just to say they'd have to pass them here as the EU directed them to - the last thing we are likely to see here is common sense in scope of the EU ...
You are horribly wrong. For these reasons:
-You are arguing based on a nationalistic view. Yes this way you capture US based minds, but you loose everyone else. "No patents = Bad for USA, Good for Europe" is an argument for the USA to abolish software patents, not for Europe to adopt them.
-You believe that the main reason for technological evolution is patents. No my friend the main reason for evolution is need. There would be no H264 codec if there was no need for it. If there is a need for it, then it will be done. And it is better if it will be done by a consortium (in a standardized way), so as for all to benefit. At the beginning MPEG, JPEG were NOT patented. Why? Because everyone needed it in order to sell more hardware. Same is with H264. They need it so as to have a way to transmit video to small devices with little bandwidth available to them.
An example of your delusion is where you say this:
"
Consider the alternatives. If software patents didn't exist in the US, the only option would be to sell a closed-source codec, and keeping the format a trade secret. This would be very, very bad. Everyone would be limited to a few supported platforms, with a poor performing codec, and no opportunity to modify or improve it. Things would be like the bad old days of RealPlayer and 4DTV.
"
From this i guess that you are either too young or too misinformed:
-What about PNG, why develop it so as to be sure that NO patent applies to it?
-What about JPEG, why did the JPEG committee investigated the patent claims in 2002 and were of the opinion that they were invalidated by prior art?. If the committee liked patents as much as you claim they are, why did they try to invalidate them?
Patents are not a silver bullet. There was major technological evolution some thousand years before them too.
What is a silver bullet is a need, and someone to recognize it and find a way to monetarize it. And with patents the second part is getting more and more difficult every day.
Don't do it, man.
--
impossible is nothing
Patents by themselves are not bad. A combination of things make them bad.
First of all, PO clerks are usually not engineers. More often than not, they are not even able to discriminate between a trivial patent and a serious one. It's also fairly hard to create a sensible standard for patenting. So what happens today is pretty much that they can at best check whether the patent is formal correct.
Then, there's FUD patents. Patents deliberately worded so broadly that they cover anything. Again, granted by clercs who don't understand them. They will probably not stand the test in court, but do you want to be the one to try them against some big corporation?
And of course generally patents created to be a lever against your opponents. Not in the normal way, but to keep them from overtaking you in your research. If you hold a key component and refuse to license it, they can never be better than you.
So yes, patents today do hurt innovation. Exactly the opposite of what they were intended for. Patents should allow a return of investment. But they're already far from that.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
IBM - a much larger corporation than Microsoft and with a similarly larger patent portfolio - is certainly taking some productive steps, especially regarding 'gifting' patents to open source projects and clearing projects using open-standards from IBM patent threat. Companies like Adobe and Apple however are still very pro software patents, unfashionable as that is to say.
The problem is not the wording of the EPC, it's the EPO's twisting of it. But - since the EPO is not an EU institution - the Parliament, Commission or Council have no say there to stop this. In this sense, the debate is "over" for a while... In any other sense, the Commission comfortably ignores that software patents are granted here.
It'll be truly fascinating to see what rhetoric will be used next, to promote software patents while denying it.
How about a law that you would have to be the _inventor_ of what you patent and actually _use it in a product_ (is that so absurd, that's what patents were meant for, right?), I think this would solve the biggest problem of patent farming companies. Also companies, in the food industry, like Montesanto then would not be able to patent DNA sequences as if they invented them and get royalties from every farmer if they have animals that possess common DNA. Unbelievably even placing the burden of proof with the farmer that he didn't use their methods.
This may sound naive but why are the courts and laws always *blatantly* in the benefit of the big corporations, with total disregard of the smaller companies and individuals? Of course I know it's because the big companies lobby as hell, but why do the people keep accepting this very undemocratic way of doing politics. Why is lobbying (and the obvious hidden bribing that occurs with it) an acceptable political tactic while we're supposed to be democratic nations? This really needs to change!
I guess I'm going to have to be the one person here to defend patents...
Consider the h.264 video codec. It cost millions of dollars to develop, and is protected ONLY by software patents. Europe wants to play the prisoner's dilemma to their own advantage. They want companies in the US and Japan to keep developing high tech, leaving US customers to pay for it, so that they can use it for free themselves (and they certainly do).
What do you mean "protected"? You cannot protect mathematics. Mathematics is the original natural science - it exists whether we like it or not. Plus, you are talking tripe - h.264 is not protected by any patient in this jurisdiction. We don't all live in America.
Ok, then I'll just publish the number prior to it, the number after it and ask good ol' Seseame-Street style "what's missing?"
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The EU simply needs to make clear that any software splashing "Protected by patent XXXX" holds exactly zero weight. For example, Adobe Acrobat Reader does pretty much exactly the same thing as the Evince document reader (except 5x slower), so what the heck are all those patents listed on the splash screen? The latest splash screen from Adobe includes:
Protected by U.S. Patents 337,604; 338,907; 371,799; 454,582; 4,667,247; 4,837,613; 5,050,103; 5,185,818; 5,200,740; 5,233,336; 5,237,313; 5,255,357; 5,546,528; 5,625,711; 5,634,064; 5,729,637; 5,737,599; 5,754,873; 5,781,785; 5,819,301; 5,832,530; 5,832,531; 5,835,634; 5,860,074; 5,929,866; 5,930,813; 5,943,063; 5,995,086; 5,999,649; 6,028,583; 6,049,339; 6,073,148; 6,185,684; 6,205,549; 6,275,587; 6,289,364; 6,324,555; 6,385,350; 6,408,092; 6,411,730; 6,415,278; 6,421,460; 6,466,210; 6,507,848; 6,515,675; 6,563,502; 6,604,105; 6,639,593; 6,701,023; 6,711,557; 6,720,977; 6,748,111; 6,754,382; 6,771,816; 6,842,786; 6,857,105; 6,894,704; 6,934,909; Patents Pending in the U.S. and other countries.
What the heck are poor coders suppose to do when they see a splash screen like that? Go to law school to learn Lawyerese and read all those patents? I suspect one interesting side-effect: few people would be brave enough to sell a product that mimics what a simple reader like Acrobat does, but they'll willingly work a few hours every week to promote an open-source community effort. In a world of lawyers, creativity flourishes anonymously. Except in the UK, where you can still sign your name.
Beer is proof that God loves us, and wants us to be happy.