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European Parliament To Exclude Free Software With FRAND
First time submitter jan.van.gent writes "The European Parliament is on the verge of adopting a directive reforming standards, reform which would introduce FRAND patent licensing terms, an undefined term which has been seen as a direct attack on the fundamental principles of Free and Open Source software. The Business Software Alliance has been very active trying to get FRAND terms into the directive."
This is confusing. It seems to go like this:
General consensus: Some "standards" are being derailed by patent holders who make unreasonable demands.
Euros: We'll pass legislation that the demands have to be reasonable.
FSF: No! Because even so-called reasonable demands exclude FOSS, hence, they aren't really "reasonable".
Euros: But half a loaf of bread...
FSF: No! Give us the whole damn loaf, or nothing!
Personally I'd be happy to get half a loaf, and then allow for others to keep fighting for the other half.
get "fair and reasonable" licensing terms to be defined as the lower of $x per unit or y% of product revenue. With no revenue, FOSS could freely use and distribute such patented software. It would even be advantageous, since software which would otherwise be locked behind a paywall could be made freely available.
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
"supported by industry associations such as the Business Software Alliance (BSA) and members including Apple, Microsoft and SAP"
The evil trio of IT and it's attack dog. But hey, they just play the game of monopoly as far as the law allows. The really ugly part are the politicians who accept the bribes - sorry, I mean, work with lobbyists - and decide regulations benefitting the 1% only.
The F in FRAND stands for "fair." FRAND is an approach used for decades by Standards committees that require any participant and any IP involved with a proposed Standard to offer open and uniform patent licensing to everyone (on the planet). This type of licensing is very much NOT the industry practice, where nearly every patent license is otherwise kept a secret and has to be painfully negotiated. There is nothing in FRAND, that I can see, that prohibits open source software or other open IP. In fact, Standards committees -- given a choice -- would far rather build in open IP to closed IP (even FRAND) into a Standard. Can someone knowledgable explain how FRAND in any way harms open source? I have worked extensively on two international Standards bodies, and have two of my own (non-patented) inventions now as ANSI standards.
I will create a sig when innovation restarts in the U.S.
... to the same extent as saying that White people only get the Vote.
Representation of SMEs: SMEs and societal stakeholders should be better represented in European standardisation, and the financial support to organisations representing SMEs and societal stakeholders will be ensured.
Open source projects and ecosystems are societal stakeholder, and open source companies providing services are often SMEs, right?
you are really upset , huh ?
If it costs anything, then it excludes some people/groups from implementing it, therefore it ISN'T A FUCKING STANDARD!!!
Here is the text of the document, the interesting parts are in annex2.
In my opinion, RAND only gives the illusion that it can match the safety of open standards. It isn't defined properly, and in the end the IPs of a standard are still in the hands of a company or a cartel (sorry, standards body), giving them effective monopoly over a market segment.
Have these people never heard of "less is more." Bureaucrats can't even get laziness right.
Hitler hates pedophiles.
This is unlikely to hold up long term even if it gets through parliament, as a number of European governments and cities have already adopted open source software in recent years.
This is another sad attempt to get proprietary software back into where it has been kicked out.
Making such changes is easy. You just replace a few words here and there in the law and you're done.
Email is still governed by the stored communications act (from the 1980s, IIRC). The FCC regulates interstate communications using laws from 1996, and those are the RECENT ones that are relevant. (common carrier laws are still based on common-law history going back to the 1800s).
It is rarely, if ever, easy to change law.
-- IANAL, this isn't legal advice, and definitely isn't legal advice for you. Also, Squee!
Baaaad example. The wheel and the cart are inventions that "happened" wiithout patents. See, things get invented even when there are NO patents.
Okay, maybe you'll say that patents make inventions happen faster. But with the Internet linking people we would have a potential pool of literally billions of would-be inventors who can produce something qualitatively superior to anything that our proverbial million monkeys can come up with. This has already happened in the "creative" fields such as pop music, where the only difference between Lady Gaga and all the other YouTube wannabees is the monstrous promotion.
Patents make sense if you have to give an incentive to a hundred or so inventors.
All governments are a....
Simplified and without long complicated phrases it sounds like this:
"No mater what you do you pay to us".
Euros: We'll pass legislation that allows the BSA to rape you, but they have to be reasonable about it, no rectal bleeding and such.
FSF: No! Keep business dick out of the public's ass!
Euros: What if it's just half a dick. That's reasonable as a compromise, right? right?
Seriously. Someone making an outlandish and outright wrong demand isn't grounds for compromise, it's grounds for rejection.
Standards are chosen for the convenience of the producer of a patented service. I don't ask for H.264 video. I just want the content. If using a patent encumbered tech to deliver your goods makes business sense for you, then you should pay the royalty. But making the consumer pay a royalty again for the ability to consume is double charging, and doing so with monopoly restricted choices. If ATT wants to use GSM cell towers, fine. But why should the handset user pay a royalty to connect?
It's silly to claim that the harm to free software is negligible. The FOSS ecosystem can't work with royalty requirements. And most FOSS would go with patent free code if it were possible. But interoperability requires implementing standards. That's not a choice.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
now, can all you comment trolls not do what you currently do, but just write to your MP in the EU parliament (eg. as social democrat I write to the social democrats delegation of my country) to stop this nonsense?
So many government mandated standards require the use of patented technology. Every single digital TV standard worldwide requires licenses for a hundred or more patents just to build the receiver/decoder. Then you need licenses on top of that to actually decode the audio and video content.
Digital radio is just as bad requiring licenses for various flavors of MPEG audio.
Anyone wanting to set up a mobile phone network or build hardware for one (including handsets) is going to need to license 100s of patents even for the most basic GSM handset.
Wireless data standards like WiFi and WiMax are also heavily patented.
In many cases these patents (or patent pools) require the payment of per-unit royalties where it is impossible for any free-as-in-zero-cost program (be it Free Software, Open Source or otherwise) to ever get a license (I know of at least one game engine that uses a derivative of MPEG audio to store things like music and had to remove support for this from their mod SDK because its impossible to get a license for a MP3 encoder for a free-as-in-zero-cost program no matter how much you pay in license fees)
Along the same lines, it would be impossible to produce a free-as-in-zero-cost DVD player for Linux (closed or open source) because patents on essential components of the DVD standards like MPEG video require the payment of per-unit royalties.
For those who think VP8 and other "open" codecs are the solution, even Google wont be able to stand up to MPEGLA if the holders of the MPEG patents decide to take Google to court and claim that VP8 infringes their patents.
The only way this can change is to get politicians in Washington and Canberra and Brussels and Auckland and Tokyo and Berlin and London and elsewhere who will pass laws eliminating software patents. But that wont happen as long as big companies continue to hold political influence over the worlds governments.
Instead of worrying about FRAND, how about we drop Stallman and his ridiculous GPL and work with something that is more free to people instead of one makes archaic poison pill?
...its provably not of patent-able subject matter.
Another truth is nobody cares for proof, but rather wants to play politics, including Richard Stallman.
The Business Software Alliance is just a lobbyist group for Microsoft. Politicians know who pays their campaign contributions.
You are not even making sense. " they do NOT have the right to demand and receive others work for free" who is asking for that? Why should FOSS not be given the same rights as proprietary? Really, give me a good reason for that.
Also, who is asking for other's work for free? I think you may things exactly backwards. Last I heard, Apple's OS is built on BSD. I think Windows also uses BSD for TCP/IP stack. For that matter, where would the internet be if not for F/OSS, and especially open standards?
The business software alliance (aka Microsoft) are a group of extortionist thugs. They have all sorts of special laws writen just for them.
Patented standards hinder progress, patents in general hinder progress, technological and scientific progress has never been aided by patents.
Society should be paying the intellectual lazyness of the supposed inventors. They have privileged knowledge of their invention, if they can't get it to be sucessful in the market then the market is better without their incompetence.
P.S.: I don't care that the FSF is angry, and I also think GPL is as good as a software patent in locking out developers. But there are other nicer licenses besisdes GPL.
We won't be needing you anymore.
Check your premises.
I don't ask for H.264 video. I just want the content.
Would you rather go back to the days when you had to maintain 7 different plugins and players on your computer to be able to play videos?
Cripes, how many ways can you get things so horribly wrong?
Yes, "beaten out of the public consciousness" over 2000 years ago
So now patents and IP have been around for 2000 years? Wow. What are you smoking?
it's because those royalties encourage inventors to disclose their work, rather than keeping it a trade secret
So the vibrant FOSS scene is really only around because of royalties? Wow. I never knew that! </sarc>
The threat of losing knowledge due to secrets being taken to the grave is sometimes trotted out as a justification for patents. However, the rapid advance of technology and the prevalence of multiple different people coming up with the same ideas stands in direct contradiction to this -- the bigger threat to the advancement of human knowledge these days is not secrets, and instead that large corporations seek to lock away any advancement for their own gain.
Besides which, if "disclosure" was the main point of patents, then someone trained in the art should be able to read a patent and create a working implementation by following the procedures laid out in the patent.
But that's not possible. That's because patents are not about disclosing ideas, and instead about locking them up as broadly as possible -- patents are less and less about specific implementations of an invention, and more and more about the very concept underlying an invention.
All your ideas r belong to us? That's not progress. But it *is* where patents (and IP laws in general) are taking us.
I don't know who the poster is or his authority to write in such apocalyptic terms (I'm a civil servant with the European Parliament, so ought to have an idea WTF I'm talking about)
The Parliament is due to consider the DRAFT legislation from the European Commission that it will adopt in May together with the European Council. The draft does talk about allowing RAND (as most European Standards Organisations already do) and does NOT talk about prohibiting FOSS - where do you get that idea?
Ah, this sounds like a line from the so-called "Open Forum Europe" - which is not open (invitation only and no publication of their full membership or funding); not a "Forum" but a lobbying outfit in Brussels; and not European - with Oracle, IBM, and Google as their principal sponsors for goodness sakes.
The European Standardisation system needs overhauling - everyone agrees...except those with heavily vested interests among the existing standards organisations (notably CEN and CENELEC who will currently get into bed with anyone who will support their less-than-transparent standardisation practices). What is not agreed is indeed the various details about IPR models, etc - but this needs to take place in open well informed debate, not this sort of scaremongering, half-baked rubbish