Slashdot Mirror
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 pursuit of software patents is teh pursuit of fraud and public deception.
abstraction physics application (including software)is a human right and duty.
Beware of software patent pursuers bearing gifts.
It's probably easy to figure out where I personally stand, given that I founded and ran the European NoSoftwarePatents campaign and that I also opposed the original proposal named EPLA (European Patent Litigation Agreement). Nevertheless I tried my best to give both sides of the argument fair and accurate representation of their statements and views on my blog.
There are indeed reasons to be concerned about a drift toward software patents in Europe, not only at the legislative level but also in terms of judicial decisions. In the past, the highest German court in such matters applied tough tests such as the controllable-forces-of-nature criterion to distinguish software patent applications from technical inventions. However, a few weeks ago it upheld one of Microsoft's FAT patents, as this slashdot article also mentions. As I explained on my blog, this could be but need not be a "FATal patent ruling". The detailed decision must be analyzed once available in order to understand whether the ruling related to the question of patentable subject matter. It's possible that it was only about inventiveness/prior art, given that the relevant court is an appeals court to which typically only certain (but very rarely all) aspects of a case are referred. In that case, the appeals court would not have been allowed to comment on non-referred issues (no matter how striking those might have been). Patent attorneys in Europe often try not to raise the question of patentable subject matter in their appeals because they would bite the hand that feeds them if they achieved rulings restricting the scope of patentable subject matter. They generally prefer to make invalidation cases on such grounds as "not inventive [as compared to prior art]", "not new [due to prior art]", "not sufficiently disclosed".
Another example of software patents that are already (unfortunately) quite enforceable in Europe are multimedia codec patents, such as MP3 and MP4 patents. It's become an annual ritual at CeBIT that dozens of confiscations of "pirated product", of which MP3 players are probably the largest group, take place on the first day of the show. I mentioned this in a recent blog post on multimedia patents.
While I appreaciate the links and information. I even more appreaciate the fact that someone finally said what as needed (and was heard).
As a patentholder (no, hardware, not software), I can vouch for the fact that a centralized european patent office is sorely needed. Currently, getting a patent in all of europe depends on first finding a patent office that WILL grant you the patent (which can be hard because most of 'em sit on their arse saying; "Ee dont under stand this technology, it's new to us". Yeah morons, ofcourse it's new, otherwise I wouldn't be patenting it, now would I ?), and then running around to every OTHER patent office in europe and saying "But THEY already gave me the patent rights".
And this is not only difficult, but also expensive and an entry barrier for new technology movers and inventors.
--- To err is human... Am I more human than most ?
I wish you idiots would stop trolling around that Jefferson quote. It is part of a long exchange of letters and deals with the argument of the patent as a natural right. Jefferson was not opposed to patents; he was instrumental in the creation of the Patent Office.
He was opposed to the argument, popular at the time, that there was a natural right to the fruits of intellectual labor. Jefferson writes in that same letter that real property is not a natural right, and thus what was called at the time industrial property, was, like ALL property, a social construct.
Using the quote to say that patents and copyrights aren't property is no more accurate than saying that real estate isn't property.
In nature, the only property that exists is that which you can physically defend from others who would want to obtain it. There is no form of property in civilized society that meets that criterion.
Florian, I do appreciate infinitely what you are doing. It's courageous and edicated folks like you who make the world a better place.
That said, I, as an European voted *for* the European Constitution (I'm Spanish). Having seen the farce which evolved in front of my eyes ("so we don't get a Constitution: we give ourselves the Lisbon treaty") I must say I regret having done so.
Those Eurocrats seem to want the legitimization without actually being bound by democracy. A Parliament which is elect4ed but has no say and a Commission which takes the bribes^H^H talks to the interest groups.
I must say I'm very disappointed (I still cast my vote as an European though).
anything that Eu does now have to be approved by the Eu parliament. If parl doesnt approve it, it cant happen.
Read radical news here
The original idea of a united Europe was a peace project. It was not about liberalizing markets,
My history might be off but I understood it that even back from the steel and coal union it was to unite through trade. Basically you can't easily change human nature but if war would send both countries into economic ruin they'd rather solve it peacefully.
and even when a legislative decision is taken, it usually takes time before it gets implemented by the Member States (enshrined in national laws) -- two years is the standard period that EU directives allow for that purpose.
This is the biggest problem with the EU directives, they're not being passed directly into law. What practically happens is that all the criticism is shot down as FUD, that's not what the law will say. And when finally the national law comes and the law is exactly as terrible you get what I call democracy theater - like security theater. All the essential moments are already in the directive, you can only pick your degree and flavor of poison. Oh they may score some cheap political points, they can throw a few temper tantrums and run a round with the EU - but EU always wins and the directive is implemented anyway. That's what the media should report "Too late - directive passed". Then hopefully people would get a clue that it's the directives and the people that pass them that matter. But that'd give away the secret of how much EU decides and how little power the national parliaments have left.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
You can mod parent down to oblivion, even when everything in it is true, and while Mueller's campaigning has proved it right. For when you try to defeat a motion democratically in the EU, and succeed, they'll push it again and again; if after the 3rd or 4th time they haven't worn you down, they'll just invoke another method using the less democratic EU frameworks to enforce it.
While people continue to support pro-EU activists who are convinced that democratic grass roots lobbying works in the EU as it might work in a national democracy, they will contribute toward the problem of helping the EU Wizard of Oz distract citizens from how it really works. It's like watching people cheerlead de Icaza while he either very misguidedly or very dishonestly waves the MS flag.
Real estate isn't property per se.
Real estate is the fundamental form of property--indeed, it's called real property!
Au contraire, all forms of property in modern society meet that criterium. Property is defined by law, laws are defined by nation-states, and i think most nation-states can will try to physically defend themselves and their laws.
Well coming from the person who thinks real property isn't property per se, this is not an unsurprising statement, but it's still idiotic.
There is no form of property, in any modern society, contingent upon the owner's ability to fend off would-be takers with physical force. On the contrary, in most of the world, it is expressly illegal to use excessive force to defend mere possessions, on the theory that you can seek redress through the legal system like a civilized person.
Property is indeed defined by law, which is a social construct. There is thus no such thing as "natural" property. Law defines property to be an exclusive right, which includes, but is not limited to real property (land), personal property (chattels, like cars and shoes), intangible property (including money, contractual benefits, stocks, and yes, intellectual property). As long as the right is created by society through its laws, it's not natural. Jefferson was of the belief, and rightly so, that property is not natural. That doesn't mean it's not a right.
On my FOSS Patents blog, I have published a report juxtaposing what the EU official said with the FFII's criticism [blogspot.com].
The FFII and the European Union are institutions I admire. You are very opinionated as an activist about patents but only strong political organisations like these may keep a patent office accountable. Patent reform is high on their agenda, blogger activism is not enough. We need to support them (donate to FFII) , support their agenda in any possible way. Without the EU there would still be wars in Europe.
You realize that “further integration” is the opposite of “democracy” because it is the removal of choices, do you?
Logically it leads towards only one government, and you being unable to flee to anywhere else, if you happen to disagree.
But it’s all awwright, because it’s in the name of the oh-so-holy “democracy”, which, when you remove the pink glasses of delusion, is not any better than a communistic “transitional government” (those that somehow never ended).
They both still have a fatal flaw: There are humans leading others, that are expected to be completely unselfish.
Let’s face it: That ain’t gonna happen. Ever. People do care for themselves. People want themselves to succeed in evolution. Or else they would by the definition of evolution, not exist.
As long as the proxy between our wishes, and what becomes the law of the land, is other humans, it won’t ever work. Period.
Democracy only has one difference: It is the stealthiest of them all. And together with modern mass-media brainwashing it is in fact nearly perfectly concealable, since you can make people want to act against their own best interests.
In short: Unless that “government” is replaced by a “very small shell script” open-source client, that forms a distributed p2p trust network with an open API, a “one government” idea is the stuff of apocalyptic horror stories.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
Hurga wrote:
Your question is right on. MP3 patents are pure software patents: compression algorithms and some of the patents don't even define a particular compression algorithm but just methods for how to organize compression (such as an iterative approach: compressing with increasing lossiness factors until the result fits into an allotted amount of memory.
In a software-patent-free world, MP3 would not be patentable either. However, substantive patent law is a complex and tricky field and differences can be subtle, resulting in one patent being upheld by a court and a seemingly similar one being thrown out. Sometimes the difference is just in how the patent application is worded. Some attorneys do a better job of presenting their patents as "technical inventions" than others.