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EU Patent Examiners Warn Parliament Will Have "No Power"
zoobab writes "The Staff Union of the European Patent Organisation sent a letter to the President of the European Parliament, warning that after the EU accedes to the European Patent Convention, there is a risk that the European Parliament would be 'circumvented' as a legislator. The European Patent Organisation is in no way a model of democracy: national patent offices are in power, there is no parliament involved in the decision-making process, and diplomatic conferences are held behind closed doors. There are plans to create a central patent court in Europe, which would operate in a democratic vacuum, not counterbalanced by any legislative assembly, in particular not the European Parliament. Such a central patent court could also validate software patents via caselaw (as the German Supreme Court recently did with the Microsoft FAT patent). And Microsoft, IBM, and SAP are lobbying in Brussels not to reopen consideration of the software patent directive."
the equivalent would have been in medieval times the monks to block the printing press after they realized that not only bibles can be printed!
Oh my God I hate these lobbyists and IP-lords!
There's no question that the current setup, in which the European Patent Office only performs a unified examination of a patent application but doesn't really grant a single European patent, is suboptimal from the perspective of those taking out patents. It's also an inefficiency that patent litigation can currently only take place on a country-by-country basis (including invalidation, unless oppositions happens early enough so that the EPO itself could reject the patent application).
However, if an international construct such as the European patent system is made more efficient and powerful, then that increase in power and efficiency should be accompanied by an at least proportional increase in power of democratically elected lawmakers governing the same field of policy-making. That should be a governing principle regardless of whether hardware, software or other patents are at stake. The patent examiners' union raises that point and basically says that the exact opposite is happening from their point of view: more power and less control.
Or you know, you can just file an application at the ALREADY EXISTING European Patent Office.
http://www.epo.org/patents/Grant-procedure/Filing-an-application/European-applications.html
This isn't about application/grants ... this is about enforcement (and consequently patentability).
Or to put it politely;
Originality is the art of concealing one's sources.
"The distinction between creation and discovery is not clear cut or rigorous.Nor is it clear why such a distinction, even if clear, is ethically relevant in defining property rights. No one creates matter; they just manipulate and grapple with it according to physical laws. In this sense, no one really creates anything. They merely re arrange matter into new arrangements and patterns. An engineer who invents a new mousetrap has rearranged existing parts to provide a function not previously performed. Others who learn of this new arrangement can now also make an improved mousetrap. Yet the mousetrap merely follows laws of nature. The inventor did not invent the matter out of which the mousetrap is made, nor the facts and laws exploited to make it work.
Similarly, Einstein's "discovery" of the relation E=mc2, once known by others, allows them to manipulate matter in a more efficient way. Without Einstein's, or the inventor's, efforts, others would have been ignorant of certain causal laws, of ways matter can be manipulated and utilized. Both the inventor and the theoretical scientist engage in creative mental effort to produce useful, new ideas. Yet one is rewarded, and the other is not".(Kinsella, Stephan. "Against Intellectual Property").
"Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property".
--Thomas Jefferson, to Isaac McPherson 13 Aug. 1813 Writings 13:333--35
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
And this is not only difficult, but also expensive and an entry barrier for new technology movers and inventors.
While that is true, please consider the following scenario:
1. Create office with power, without responsibility, and without anyone in the bureaucratic machine who can question their decisions
2. Install own people (did I mention it's not an elected body?)
3. WELCOME BACK SOFTWARE PATENTS
At least the national patent offices have clearly defined authorities they report to. Do we really need more red tape to sync databases?
Its really simple, nobody wants to deal with the matter for the honesty of the matter.
Neither Proprietary patent supporting parties nor open source patent free parties.
Why is also simple. The honesty of the matter of software would result in not only no software patents but also in genuinely free software, free in the since of making it possible for anyone to create software.
Current software development methodologies are like the roman numeral system in mathematics, where it takes specialization and trade secrets to do any complex math. But then came along the Hindu-Arabic decimal system that enabled the population to do math even beyond the experts. And the experts probably argued that only a fool would think nothing can have value (the zero place holder), as today the coding experts claim the user is not interested in creating programs. Where the fact is that users just don't want it to be a full time job requiring years of schooling and/or heavy personal pursuit. They just want to create or modify occasionally, no different than occasionally using math or a calculator to determine a result.
But the current software development methodologies do not support "occasionally". And the unnecessary level of overcomplexifabulocation in software development is the "only a fool would want to do it occasionally" false defense.
Help Prove Software is not Patentable and end this matter once and for all, and it is provable, otherwise you are playing othello, reversi.
And anyone who has been following this software patent battle damn well knows this othello, reversi game well, even if only as a spectator.
1. Design crippled file system (8.3 filenames)
2. "Invent" "ingenious" fix that fixes the aforementioned flaw somewhat (long filenames)
3. Patent & license. Win.
No "???" here. Only "WTF" and where is our society heading?
No, the main goal have always been further integration and democracy within the Union, however, certain groups who often complain that the EU is undemocratic refuse to let it become more democratic, i.e. Eurosceptics such as the British Conservative party or the UKIP, because apparently a democratic Union would undermine national sovereignty.
"Civis Europaeus sum!"
Patents will always be a double edged sword. A guy with a great idea can easily have it stolen by a large company in the same field with the ability to create and market the product much faster. Knock off companies become king. Think of an entire world full of unscrupulous chinese manufacturers forever cloning other people's products.
OTOH big companies with deep pockets can play the patent troll game far easier than in individual entrepreneur/inventor.
Ideally a patent provides a limited time period for inventors to profit from their idea, encouraging innovation while including a mechanism whereby these innovations can eventually pass into the public domain for the benefit of the general public.
The entire purpose of the EU was to reduce the crippling bureaucratic balkanization and get all the countries working from the same playbook. How can you expect a small country with, for example, no electronics manufacturing to have patent office expertise for that industry?
The big problem with the current issue isn't patents but the lack of checks and balances. The core idea of democracy is that every part of government has "civilian oversight".
I have mod points. The reign of terror begins now.
Who are the persons? Unelected conspirators govern the EPO? Bilderberg group?
I followed it fairly closely at the time. The EU Council created legislation that would have solidly established Software Patents. The EU Parliament then passed several reasonably solid amendments against Software Patents. And then the legislation was killed. Some would speculate that it was killed because certain interests decided that the existing muddy EU patent situation was preferable to permitting the EU Parliament to legislate against Software Patents.
The EU Parliament definitely sided against that "per se" crap.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
Elektroschock wrote:
I don't think the staff union of the European Patent Office or the FFII wanted to suggest any kind of conspiracy theory. In my report on the FFII's criticsm of the proposed reform, that thinking is explained under the following subhead:
The theory of a "captive" court system
(contains a reference to what a justice of the SCOTUS said about the patent-specialized CAFC)
I don't get why MP3 patents are enforceable. If it was special hardware they are running on, I would understand it, but - for example -the Sandisk Sansa players, which were confiscated at Cebit some years ago and one of which I incidentally own, are generic hardware, simple MP3 decoding on the ARM CPUs of the player, no DSP or custom chip support. If that is enforceable, everything is. Or where is the difference to other software?