Most market share numbers are "market share of sold computers", not "market share of installed base". In fact, that's one argument that Apple often uses to react to claims that it has only minuscule market share (+ the fact that sales from a.o. its online store aren't calculated in the market share numbers, afaik).
1. While software patents aren't strictly legal in Europe, they are easily implemented anyway. This is done using a number of techniques including wrapping them up in 'technical processes' which are perfectly legal. There are currently a huge number of software patents that exist in Europe that have been implemented this way.
There are indeed already more than 30,000 European software patents in the mean time, including these ones. Whether or not they are legal can only be determined by a court. In some countries, such as the UK, courts generally accept software patents. In other countries, such as Germany (although this has been changing lately) they aren't. In still other countries, such as the Netherlands, people haven't even ever tried to enforce a software patent.
2. Of the ones that can't be wrapped up in this method, a large number of patents are set-up and currently pending the highly expected change in the law.
Absolutely. FWIW, they tried to change it before as well, without a directive (by directly changing the European Patent Convention and removing the exception for "computer programs as such"). However, that failed, so they started the directive project.
3. Everyone I spoke to was perfectly confident that software patents would eventually be implemented in line with the US. The European economy would be dependant on this in the long term.
It's bullshit that the European economy requires software patents. See this page for a list of economic studies suggesting the contrary. I'd be very impressed if anyone could produce a similarly sized list of economic studies suggesting that software patents are good for the economy.
Also, the law change would not be retrospective so all previously used inventions (but not the ones currently pending) will be public domain.
That's also bullshit. The directive is about the enforceability of patents, not about the granting requirements. It's simple to verify: if the above were true, why would all those big companies be whining that the EP's version threatens to invalidate their software patents, while the Council's version keeps them valid?
4. They were all very aware of the 'open source crowd' and sympathised with their cause.
Keep in mind that "the open source crowd" is not the only, and not even the biggest, opponent of software patents. They are the most vocal one, though.
They explained that if the law was changed, it would only prevent the open source crowd from copying other software and would not limit them from innovating.
Copying is prohibited by copyright. Patents also apply if you discovered something completely on your own, but which was previously patented by someone else. Patents have absolutely nothing to do with copying. In fact, since most patents are in the hands of large companies, they can use those often to threaten smaller companies and as such be able to buy those out quite cheaply (thus "stealing" intellectual property from small companies which are virtually defenseless in a world dominated by software patents).
However, when I mentioned the Microsoft 'double click' patent, they all laughed out loud and warned me these things were usually a thousand times more complicated and subtle than I had been led to believe.
Bullshit. It's true that in case of the Microsoft "double click" patent, that patent does not cover plain double clicking. But it's not "a thousand times more complicated and subtle" then you were led to believe. They are often worded in such a way, but in reality the "limitations" in those wordings mean squat.
Example: the aforementioned MS patent only applies to "limited resource computing devices". However, I s
Thinking is not enough in case you are writing legislation. You must know, or at least have damn good evidence to support your thinking. The problem is that in case of software patents, most evidence points the other way.
The codecision procedure under which this directive is handled, also requires that in the end the EP and the Council agree (and indirectly the Commission as well, since they can retract the whole directive if they don't like where it's going). After the first reading in the Council (which just passed), it goes back for a second reading to the EP and then again for a second reading to the Council if the EP makes changes. If there's still no compromise between the two bodies after that, a conciliation committee is formed with representatives from both bodies (and possibly also the Commission) to work things out.
However, that's all besides the point of this story. The problem is that the ministers in the Council are supposed to represent the view of their national legislative bodies, which they didn't in case of e.g. the Netherlands and Germany. On top of that, the version they approved was directly written by civil servants from the national and European patent offices! And the people that advised them how to vote, were largely those same people from national patent offices. You know, the same people that started the whole mess by giving out software patents in the first place....
Because I agree with you. I was describing a failed culture that rules much of the middle east. That the inept, brutal theocracies & dictatorships are the norm over there says something about the culture that produced and continues to live under such a system.
And thanks to who can several remain in force? Yes, thanks to Western support, because we need their oil, so as long as they're nice to us, we help them. Just look at e.g. Saudi-Arabia.
Yes, the kind and gentle face that insists that software patents be legalised in Europe, so they can continue to afford being nice. After all, those allow them to neutralise most potential threats should they become too annoying.
Apple's knowledge base also contains some gems, like this one about Mac OS X Mail:
You print from Mail, but the printout looks strange--backwards and upside down, that is. Instead of standing on your head and using a mirror to read it, try our helpful tips before you print.
I can tell you from working with similar patch dumps from TransGaming that this is very nearly as bad as not getting the changes back at all
The KDE developers seems to disagree. FWIW, I have no idea whether they only submitted such a huge patch at once after the initial release of Safari, or whether they now submit their patches more incrementally. Most of what they change isn't that secret, after all Dave Hyatt talks about them all the time in his blog.
Many people are like that. One day, my landlady thought I had missed a payment. She called me and when I told her I just checked using the online interface to my bank account that the payment was really made, she asked me to print a copy of the receipts as "proof". Simply the date of the transfer was not enough for some reason.
It took me quite a while to explain to her that I could save the html ("But surely you can't edit the web pages of your bank, can you?"), type in anything I wanted to, print it and send it to her. After I went through all this trouble to explain how I could cheat her, she seemed to assume I was telling the truth and that I did pay it.
Since freecache only caches files >5MB, this isn't going to help anything (freecache is just going to pass those requests through to the original server)...
But that's not the essence of what I was saying. The essence is, there is a lot of fuss about the Parliament changing a vote that the minister already did, and that has not happened. So, the vote stays as it is, unless another vote occurs. In the explanation you quoted they even specifically state that they are not asking to ask for another vote. Typical Dutch compromise.
This is correct.
To be 100% correct on the homework: The motion asks, not urges, the government, not the minister, to communicate the opinion to the other memebers of the EU, and asks, not urges, the government, not the minister, to act from this opinion and starting from this moment to abstain from voting on the current proposal.
State Secretary Van Gennip has stated they will do both these things.
I don't know enough about the proceedings to know what the effect will be, but it looks to me that if nothing triggers another vote there will be no effect of this.
That letter and all this press attention is a huge effect. It's the first time a government publicly changes its opinion between coming to "a political agreement on a common position of the Council" and the formalisation of this position. The fact that they send this letter to other member states, is very bad for Brinkhortst's reputation and shows to other countries that it is still perfectly possible to change their opinion.
Given that the Netherlands changed its opinion, they may also start thinking about the reason for which this happened. I.o.w.: a pretty serious political event, lots of press attention, a change for the good in the Dutch position. What better PR could you want?
In other words, the Dutch Parliament has urged the Minister to change the Dutch vote. The Minister has the right to disregard the Parliament's urging and keep the Dutch vote as it is (in favour of software patenting).
The State Secretary has literally stated they will abide by the motion, so it is correct to state that the Dutch support for software patents has been withdrawn. The parliament did not force them in a juridical way, but in a political way.
I'm guessing you live under that system you described in such clear detail (thanks:).
I indeed live under it (I'm from Belgium), but the only reason I know it in detail is that I've been following this directive so closely for the last year. Before that, I had no idea at all how things worked.
Do you like it?
Not really. The Commission and Council are too powerful, the Parliament too weak. It's great there is a Parliament though, without them we'd be lost completely. They'll get slightly more power when/if the European Constitution is voted, but not much. It'll mainly codify the current power relationships, and add a few other undesirable things (like bluntly stating "Intellectual property has to be protected", without even defining what intellectual property is... I.e., banning software patents may even become unconstitutional)
The problem is that Poland's vote (8 votes) was wrongly recorded at the meeting in May. However, in the mean time the Polish have gone from stating that they were still against but that there vote was not recorded, to stating that they were in favour of the "compromise". I don't know why or how, but the practical upshot is that we now need 5 more votes to break the qualified majority.
And the note about the fact that the motion for abstention has been adopted, is on page 193:
In stemming komt de motie-Van Dam c.s. (21501-30, nr. 52).
De voorzitter: Ik constateer dat de aanwezige leden van de fractie van de VVD tegen deze motie hebben gestemd en die van de overige fracties ervoor, zodat zij is aangenomen.
Ah - the European federal government is even more complicated than it appeared to me. National governments (typically parliaments) decide, then instruct their minister(s) to the EU Parliament, which votes to propose a law. Meanwhile, national governments also instruct their minister(s?) to the EU Council of Ministers, which selects from proposed laws, including those proposed by the Council, for a final candidate law for passage. Then the Council votes again, binding them to accept or reject the accepted candidate law. Is that correct? Is that the format for every law?
First of all, the Players:
The Commission: a bunch of unelected people, who get their position by horse trading among the different national governments, with some influence from the large political groups in the EP.
The Council of Ministers: not really one body. There are several Council formations (e.g. there's one on competitiveness, which is the one handling this directive), but they're all called "The Council of Ministers". Every formation consists of ministers (sometimes State Secretaries or even just civil servants) delegated from the national governments, and depending on the subject, these are other people. One always talks about "The Council has decided that..." though.
The European Parliament: the only body among the three which is directly elected.
Next, there are several possible decision procedures, but I only know one in detail: the co-decision procedure, which is what the software patents directive goes through. It's actually the procedure most directives go through nowadays. It works like this:
The Commission proposes a directive text (or in our case: the BSA, after which the Commission comes forward with a copy of this text and claims it's its own), along with several studies (which in this case univocally stated that economically, software patents are a bad idea). I think they do this on initiative of the member states, but I'm not sure.
This text gets an opinion from the European Economical and Social Committee (which completely blasted the Commission text in this case)
The text goes to two advising Committees of the European Parliament, in this case the Committee of Culture and Youth (CULT) and the Committee of Industry and Trade (ITRE), which both heavily amended the Commission proposal (one removed pure software patents, the other guaranteed the right to publication and interoperability).
The text goes to the responsible Committee (Committee on Juridical Affairs and Internal Market (JURI) in this case), which created a text more or less identical to what was approved in the Council, except that they accidentally left in the interoperability amendment).
The text goes to the plenary of the European Parliament, where the amendments from the responsible Committee (JURI) are voted on, along with all amendments proposed by either a political group, or a group of 32 or more MEPs. The result was a definite "no" to software patents.
Then the original Commission text goes together with the EP text to the Council, for which the resulting text of the EP is just an "advice". The Commission sent along a list of all unacceptable EP amendments.
The Council lets its "Working Party on Intellectual Property (Patents)" formulate a counterproposal for the EP text. This Working Party mainly consists of civil servants from national and even the European Patent office, i.e. the people that started giving out software patents in the first place.
The Council votes about this counterproposal, whereby the national delegations are mostly advised by those same people who wrote the counterproposal. They accept a text which is even more pro-software patents than the original Commis
What I do know: Some Company X makes a product that costs them some amount of dollars (investment). They work to intellectually protect their product *god forbid* & investment. Then they go to produce (supply) and sell (sell cost) to make the most amount of profit.
A company can get all the protection it needs to realise what you describe by means of copyright. Software patents in fact undermine its investments: it spends a lot of money on R&D and writing a program, brings it on the market and then gets sued into oblivion because apparently this program infringes one or other obscure (or not) software patent.
Even if the patent is invalid, a law suit to get the patent invalidated costs between $US 1,500,000 and $US 2,000,000 depending on who you listen to. Great protection of investment...
Summarised: patents have both good and bad effects. The economic studies from my previous post show that the bad effects are worse in case of software patents than the good ones (and undermine other forms of already existing protection for investments in software). So the logical conclusion is: no software patents.
OK, so they're voting "yes" any more, but they're hardly fighting back. What help is an abstention?
It's a very strong political signal (because it's normally "not done" to change your vote between the political agreement on a common position and the adoption of the common position). And the directive needs a qualified majority in the Council, which means that an abstention has the same effect as a no-vote.
We still need more no-votes to break the qualified majority, but thanks to this victory, getting those votes now is actually realistic.
This law they are trying to pass will allow companies to patent the software (intellectual property) that they have written? Just like any other company that does R&D (the most costly aspect of producing a product) what is the problem with it being patented?
You have apparently no idea of the economics of writing software. Have a look at these studies the EP took into account when voting against software patentability... And that doesn't even include the FTC study that was published afterwards.
The European Parliament voted against software patents. The Council simply disregarded all research taken into account by the EP (some of which was even ordered by the Commission), and went for unlimited software patents (without justifications, except generalisations like "patents are important for innovation", without backing up those statements with economical research). This was supported by the Dutch minister Brinkhorst, who represented the Netherlands at the Council.
Now, the Dutch parliament has told the minister to retract his support, because he misinformed the Parliament before the vote (he told them there was a compromise between the EP and the Council, while their positions are completely contrary).
Actually, it's worse: the Dutch minister told the Parliament before the vote that there was a compromise between the European Parliament and the Council, so that it would simply be a formalisation. After the vote it came to light the minister had lied (explained as "an error in the word processor" by his State Secretary), so the Parliament asked the minister to retract his vote (because if they had known the truth beforehand, they would have been against voting in favour as well).
Note however that the vote was on "a political agreement on a common position of the Council", and that until this political agreement is formalised, no official vote has taken place yet. Of course, it's very much "not done" to change your stance after a political agreement has been reached, but there are no juridical hurdles which prevent you from doing that.
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Most market share numbers are "market share of sold computers", not "market share of installed base". In fact, that's one argument that Apple often uses to react to claims that it has only minuscule market share (+ the fact that sales from a.o. its online store aren't calculated in the market share numbers, afaik).
There are indeed already more than 30,000 European software patents in the mean time, including these ones. Whether or not they are legal can only be determined by a court. In some countries, such as the UK, courts generally accept software patents. In other countries, such as Germany (although this has been changing lately) they aren't. In still other countries, such as the Netherlands, people haven't even ever tried to enforce a software patent.
Absolutely. FWIW, they tried to change it before as well, without a directive (by directly changing the European Patent Convention and removing the exception for "computer programs as such"). However, that failed, so they started the directive project.
It's bullshit that the European economy requires software patents. See this page for a list of economic studies suggesting the contrary. I'd be very impressed if anyone could produce a similarly sized list of economic studies suggesting that software patents are good for the economy.
That's also bullshit. The directive is about the enforceability of patents, not about the granting requirements. It's simple to verify: if the above were true, why would all those big companies be whining that the EP's version threatens to invalidate their software patents, while the Council's version keeps them valid?
Keep in mind that "the open source crowd" is not the only, and not even the biggest, opponent of software patents. They are the most vocal one, though.
Copying is prohibited by copyright. Patents also apply if you discovered something completely on your own, but which was previously patented by someone else. Patents have absolutely nothing to do with copying. In fact, since most patents are in the hands of large companies, they can use those often to threaten smaller companies and as such be able to buy those out quite cheaply (thus "stealing" intellectual property from small companies which are virtually defenseless in a world dominated by software patents).
Bullshit. It's true that in case of the Microsoft "double click" patent, that patent does not cover plain double clicking. But it's not "a thousand times more complicated and subtle" then you were led to believe. They are often worded in such a way, but in reality the "limitations" in those wordings mean squat.
Example: the aforementioned MS patent only applies to "limited resource computing devices". However, I s
However, that's all besides the point of this story. The problem is that the ministers in the Council are supposed to represent the view of their national legislative bodies, which they didn't in case of e.g. the Netherlands and Germany. On top of that, the version they approved was directly written by civil servants from the national and European patent offices! And the people that advised them how to vote, were largely those same people from national patent offices. You know, the same people that started the whole mess by giving out software patents in the first place....
Yes, the kind and gentle face that insists that software patents be legalised in Europe, so they can continue to afford being nice. After all, those allow them to neutralise most potential threats should they become too annoying.
Many people are like that. One day, my landlady thought I had missed a payment. She called me and when I told her I just checked using the online interface to my bank account that the payment was really made, she asked me to print a copy of the receipts as "proof". Simply the date of the transfer was not enough for some reason.
It took me quite a while to explain to her that I could save the html ("But surely you can't edit the web pages of your bank, can you?"), type in anything I wanted to, print it and send it to her. After I went through all this trouble to explain how I could cheat her, she seemed to assume I was telling the truth and that I did pay it.
Since freecache only caches files >5MB, this isn't going to help anything (freecache is just going to pass those requests through to the original server)...
Given that the Netherlands changed its opinion, they may also start thinking about the reason for which this happened. I.o.w.: a pretty serious political event, lots of press attention, a change for the good in the Dutch position. What better PR could you want?
The problem is that Poland's vote (8 votes) was wrongly recorded at the meeting in May. However, in the mean time the Polish have gone from stating that they were still against but that there vote was not recorded, to stating that they were in favour of the "compromise". I don't know why or how, but the practical upshot is that we now need 5 more votes to break the qualified majority.
First of all, the Players:
Next, there are several possible decision procedures, but I only know one in detail: the co-decision procedure, which is what the software patents directive goes through. It's actually the procedure most directives go through nowadays. It works like this:
Even if the patent is invalid, a law suit to get the patent invalidated costs between $US 1,500,000 and $US 2,000,000 depending on who you listen to. Great protection of investment...
Summarised: patents have both good and bad effects. The economic studies from my previous post show that the bad effects are worse in case of software patents than the good ones (and undermine other forms of already existing protection for investments in software). So the logical conclusion is: no software patents.
We still need more no-votes to break the qualified majority, but thanks to this victory, getting those votes now is actually realistic.
Now, the Dutch parliament has told the minister to retract his support, because he misinformed the Parliament before the vote (he told them there was a compromise between the EP and the Council, while their positions are completely contrary).
Note however that the vote was on "a political agreement on a common position of the Council", and that until this political agreement is formalised, no official vote has taken place yet. Of course, it's very much "not done" to change your stance after a political agreement has been reached, but there are no juridical hurdles which prevent you from doing that.