Well, it's article 10 (search for "10.1"), but apart from that you're completely right:
Article 10.1 provides that computer programs, whether in source or object code, shall be protected as literary works under the Berne Convention (1971). This provision confirms that computer programs must be protected under copyright and that those provisions of the Berne Convention that apply to literary works shall be applied also to them. It confirms further, that the form in which a program is, whether in source or object code, does not affect the protection. The obligation to protect computer programs as literary works means e.g. that only those limitations that are applicable to literary works may be applied to computer programs. It also confirms that the general term of protection of 50 years applies to computer programs. Possible shorter terms applicable to photographic works and works of applied art may not be applied.
And before the ip lawyers come wining that a computer program executed by a computer is supposedly a technical process instead of a literary work: it isn't. The EU Software Copyright directive of 1991 states clearly that a computer program protected as a literary work includes (article 4):
... the permanent or temporary reproduction of a computer program by any means and in any form, in part or in whole. Insofar as loading, displaying, running, transmission or storage...
Anyway, that distinction is also silly from a logical point of view. Otherwise, you'd also have to start arguing that when an author writes a play, his copyright only extends to what he wrote down and that he does not have any rights to remuneration when his play is performed (because then it's supposedly no longer a play as such)
The provisions of this Directive are without prejudice to the application of Articles 81 and 82 of the Treaty, in particular where a dominant supplier refuses to allow the use of a patented technique which is needed for the sole purpose of ensuring conversion of the conventions used in two different computer systems or networks so as to allow communication and exchange of data content between them.
That's only in a recital, not in an article. Further, what they are saying is simply that you cannot use patents to violate the anti-trust rules. If you are an SME and are hampered by a software patent, you've gone bankrupt ten times before the anti-trust proceedings have finally finished. It took more than 5 years to the get Microsoft case to finish, and will take several more years if they appeal.
The AFS vulnerability, which is the only process in the whole list which runs under root privs, would require someone be running AFS (the Apple equiv of NFS) over the Internet.
FWIW, the protocol is called AFP, not AFS. And it's more the equivalent of samba than of nfs.
Well, he has used the Omniscient Debugger to debug itself. In a paper published about it at the AADEBUG03 conference, the author writes
In actual experience with the ODB, neither CPU overhead nor memory requirements have proven to be a major stumbling block. Debugging the debugger with itself is not a problem on a 110 MHz SS4 with 128 MB. On a 700 MHz iBook it's a pleasure. All bugs encountered while developing the ODB fit easily into the 500k event limit of the small machine.
I also disagree with your assertion that all situations where experienced programmers need a debugger involve lots of code and large amounts of data. The former is most of the time true, but latter isn't necessarily.
Debugging backwards in time. See the Omniscient Debugger for an implementation in Java. Instead of re-executing the program a thousand times, each time setting breakpoints and watchpoints in different places to get nearer to the root cause of the problem, this debugger completely records all key events and lets you view the complete program state at any point in time.
Another reason to gradually and pro-actively swap things out, is that when another program later needs a lot of memory, your system doesn't come to a grinding halt because suddenly a lot of stuff has to be swapped out at once (followed by zeroing all that memory, since you don't want to have one program leaking data to another).
At least, that's the rationale I've read behind OS X's strategy of swapping things out long before all physical memory is used (and of keeping a pool of zeroed memory pages ready to fulfill most requests). Note that this does not require superfluous swap-ins if your reuse strategy is balanced properly, as the fact that something is swapped out doesn't mean that the memory which contained that data will be cleared/reused immediately (i.e., if it's needed again shortly afterwards, that page can be reactivated without having to go to disk).
Under most desktop OS'es, programs can even give some hints to the system regarding their usage of a memory region using e.g. the madvise() system call.
In the past, the whole of Costa Rica has already been blocked once because their national ISP (racsa.co.cr, which was (is?) the only one available) did nothing against Ralsky's bestiality and incest porn spamming via their networks and hosting his sites on their network.
And since this is in the "Your Rights Online" category: I think everyone has the right to refuse mail from anyone else. If an ISP uses this blocking list without properly informing his customers and without offering a way for his customers to opt-out of this kind, then this ISP is obviously at fault, not the people who publish the blacklist. The latter are simply like a consumer magazine that advises against buying a particular product because it performed very bad compared to other tested products.
Link to patent: Coding system for reducing redundancy
The title of the patent has nothing to do with what it covers, only the claims do. The "only" thing they cover is run length encoding (i.e., changing "0 0 0 0 0 0" to "6 0", and 45 variants of that). Of course, that's still immensely broad, but that patent does not allow them lay claim to all kinds of compression (even though they all reduce redundancy).
Actually, they simply refuse to give licenses to small companies altogether, just read this message. As a litigation company, it costs them more to negotiate a license with a small company than what they could make from it, so they don't. It's completely independent from open source or not...
Only the US grants software patents per se. All GB and EP patents should have some element of technicality to them, and so are only software related. This fact removes most of the US style problems. Not to say the odd one doesn't get through:(.
You are making a false distinction between a patent on "a computer program" and a patent on "a computer executing a computer program in its memory using a processing means and blablabla". There is no functional difference between the two, they boil down to exactly the same thing.
This is not just my opinion, it's literally what the EU Software Copyright Directive of 1991 says. It defined a computer program as literary work as
the permanent or temporary reproduction of a computer program by any means and in any form, in part or in whole. Insofar as loading, displaying, running, transmission or storage
As you can see, the process executed by a computer program is identical to the computer program as such as far as this directive is concerned. This directive cannot be overruled by the patent professionals running the EPO.
There's a complex relationship between inventive step and technicality that means these two issues are closely related. If you can show something's fairly obvious, you can usually show it's not technical too.
Whether or not something is non-obvious has nothing to do with whether or not something is technical, except in EPO case law. Even juridically this trickery is not allowed by TRIPs: it states that the conditions for patentability must be the same for all inventions in all fields of technology. Therefore, if you insist on declaring algorithms interpreted by a computer as "inventions" and data processing as "a field of technology", then you cannot make special rules regarding the patentability of this kind of "inventions".
A 'good' software patent for me is one that is definitely technical,
What is technical in your book? It's one of those words thrown around by everyone, but none of the proponents of software patents wants to define it. If you don't define it, it can mean anything and as such is an empty condition.
has a well defined scope and has a major difference between the it and the prior art. If you really want to know some examples, I might find one later, but can't promise anything. Of course not all patents are amazing and totally revolutionary, but just baby steps from the prior art. This is true for all fields of invention.
Indeed, and it's one of the reasons patents are traditionally not applied to the fields of mathematics, logical reasoning, business methods, computer programs etc. In those fields, almost all advances are baby steps and a programmer makes tens of those baby steps on an average working day. Giving monopolies on those baby steps is nefarious and does not serve any purpose: without the incentives offered by patents, they will be made as well because that's simply how things work in these fields.
No non-technical patent should be granted in the EP or UK. The big problem I think is the lack of patent based prior art for examiners to find. Since most of the relevant stuff is not in there, but fairly well hidden elsewhere, it's not surprising that examiners might not no of it, especially since they're not programmers.
Please finally read this page. It has nothing to do with incompetent examiners. Lack of documentation is part of the problem, but just a very small part. Technical means squat in the current patent jargon.
Patents are not going to go away. They exist at the moment, and there are negative consequences for disposing of the whole idea. This means, in the conservative nature of the real world, they won't ever go, at least in our lifetim
One thing I can see is that many people in the OS community spend quite a bit of time bellyaching about patents, software and non-software (I bet reading/. to much has colored my perception) but if they actually spent the same amount of time actually doing something about it (sending in a 'Hey - that is obvious' or 'Hey - prior art' message to the patent office) they would actually get quite a bit further than just complaining.
"Obvious" does not mean what you'd think it means. An easy and simple innovation can be perfectly non-obvious as far as patent law is concerned. See this link. Doing all that work would not help much, it's like "mopping with the flood gates open" (that's not a proper English expression I guess, but I hope it's clear what I mean).
Suggesting that people should support this malpractice by working with the system, is like saying that a law which allows the police to lock up people based on merely a hint of suspicious activity is good, and instead of complaining about it, people should gather evidence that proves that wrongly locked up people are innocent, so they can be set free again by the authorities. It's just the world turned upside-down.
I can back this up since I work with patents for a living.
The latter was already quite clear for a while:)
It's actually more common for cases to be sent S21 observations by private individuals than companies in my experience.
How exactly does that back up your claim that little companies do that all the time?
I'm talking so much about OSS, since I really appreciate what they do, especially being a Linux geek. Their ability to organise is respectable, and so they're perfectly capable of carrying out the actions I outlined (the patents and design journal is available online, and all patents are listed with their classification,
That's all nice and dandy, but there is no particular "software patent" classification.
so can be checked in literally about 5 minutes). This is a way that would work to protect them and their work using already existing measures that work.
But why on Earth should they have to do that? They are good at organising around something they like to do (hacking). I can't imagine they would enjoy sifting to patent applications. And this would mean they'd have less time for hacking.
Software-related patents are not all bad,
Please show me some examples of what you would consider good software patents. Honestly, I'm really curious. I went through hundreds of them already, and did not find a single one that I would consider good (most of the time the "invention" itself is trivial, and even if not -e.g. in the case of mp3-, the granted monopolies are absurdly wide). I'm also curious as to what your definition of a "good" software patent would be.
and are not going to go away. It's better surely to deal constructively with the Patent Office and examiners to avoid an undesireable outcome. Complaininng about the situation and being uncooperative won't get you anywhere.
Since I live in Europe, we still have a chance to not get them. I'm not just complaining about them, I'm actively working with politicians and companies to avoid getting trapped in the same situation as the US, where indeed the only way to alleviate the situation somewhat seems to be cooperation with the patent office...
I also don't see why people should not complain about a system that is obviously broken, as e.g. the FTC's study showed. Mainly lawyers, some big companies and parasites like Eolas profit from it. Not a single economist is in favor, and the only "economical" study that shows they supposedly have positive effects until now has been carried out by a professor in law at a School of Law...
It really is the world turned upside down: there is a system which in general has bad economical and social effects (tons of overly broad patents, more often than not based on trivial innovations; stifled innovation in general; prejudice of the author's right; diverting of R&D budgets to juridical departments;...), but according to you people should not complain and just keep on trying to patch the this obviously broken system. Why should it not go away?
The logical course of action is to first find some arguments why a certain IP-exclusion system applied toi a certain economical branch could be good in general, then research whether those arguments hold in practice and if so, only then introduce it. It's true that you have this strange system in place now, but claiming that people should just swallow this illogical system of monopolies (on logical reasonings no less) and not question its foundation (as far as there is any, except in law) does not make sense to me.
PS: please check also the link that Mr/Ms AC provided, it makes for really good reading on the issue of "good" and "bad" software patents
Can you back this up? I know several SME's and none of them does that. They prefer to invest their time and money in R&D to checking patent journals.
So do ordinary members of the public. It's simple, it just seems to be that people don't know the mechanism.
Do you have any idea how a small software company works? Do you really think they have time to do a bit of patent reading on the side, deciphering all claims and checking whether they haven't ever published any software yet which uses what is claimed? Not to mention the fact that the eventually granted claims often differ quite a bit from what was originally published.
It's a pretty cheap and easy thing to do, just a bit tedious. Subscribe to the patents journal (which may have an on-line version for free, I can't remembre. It may also be in bigger city/universiy libraries). Anything that sticks out as being potentially software related & obvious, make a note of. Put the numbers into one of the various free patent databases, such as Espacenet. Read patent. If it's obvious and you can prove it, write a quick letter to the Patent Office as to why.
Last week I went to a conference where several SME owners and even someone from the juridical department of a fairly large company (Magix) spoke. They said a lot of things, but none of it was that it was easy to follow all patents coming out and quickly finding out which of all claims would possibly make one of their products to become infringing (and thus result in their product being prior art). They really have other things to do than what you suggest.
All it needs is a bit of effort to understand the patent system and dedication to do the work. If this can prevent the problems caused by obvious patents to the OS community, which I think it has everything to do with, then why should it not be done?
The problem is not just obvious patents, it's all software patents. It should not be done because it results in more resources being diverted away from useful (as in useful for the economy/society) R&D work, than what is possibly gained back by allowing people to exclude others to use the same abstract reasonings in their literary works. That is not specific to the open source community at all, it's just a general principle which holds for all software companies and in particular for SME's and independent developers.
Of course, a lot of open source developers are independent developer (though not all, just think of e.g. IBM), but claiming it's somehow specific to the open source community is like claiming that nuclear explosions are unhealthy for pregnant women. It's true, but not telling half the story.
To see what is covered by a patent (i.e., on what the owners have a monopoly), you have to read the claims. Then you can see they have a patent on run length encoding, i.e. the algorithm of changing "0 0 0 0 0 0" to "6 0" (along with 45 variants of that principle).
Everything that appears in the "description" part is simply the "invention" that justifies the fact that they got this right to exclude others from using run length encoding, but is otherwise completely independent from the monopoly they received.
Software patents make the patenting country produce more expensive, inferior software than a country that doesn't have patents. All source code should be free and shared, patent should be eliminated from all countries.
You are completely mixing copyright and patents. FFII and pretty much all other opponents are not asking that all source code should be free and shared. In fact, they argue that (the free) trade secret is one of the ways that people can protect their software innovations without having to resort to (expensive) patents.
Together with copyright, lead time advantages, licensing, NDA's etc, they have a whole arsenal of means to protect their own creations, without hampering any other person's independent creation (unlike with software patents, where many other independent creations are hampered by one person's patent)
However, I should point out that Article
6 of the proposed Directive provides that the rights conferred by patents
granted for inventions within the scope of the Directive shall not affect
acts permitted under Directive 91/250/EEC on the legal protection of
computer programs by copyright, in particular under the provisions thereof
in respect of decompilation and interoperability. This is an important
safeguard for software developers as it will ensure that such developers
can continue to engage in the same acts to achieve interoperability as are
currently allowed under the Copyright Directive.
This is so much spindoctoring it isn't funny anymore. The provisions of the Directive 91/250/EEC state indeed that you are allowed to reverse engineer a computer program for e.g. interoparability.
However, what they're not telling you is that reverse engineering/decompilation could never be prohibited by a patent in the first place! A patent prohibits you to use or exploit what is patented, not observing or analysing it. So they're including a provision in the software patent directive that gives you a right that you already had and which they can't take away.
As I said, a patent can be used to prohibit the use of a patented technique. So if you after all your reverse engineering work finally discover how to make your program interoperable with the other one, you can't actually implement this: after all, that would boil down to using the patented technique, which is not allowed by the Council/Commission version. So there is no interoperability guarantee whatsoever.
The European Parliament however explicitly stated that this should be allowed (with 393 against 35 votes, no less). Needless to say, the Council wants to remove this amendment.
This would allow people to see in detail which
parts of the European Parliament's amendments
to the Commission proposal's were rejected and
on what grounds.
The big and important differences are articles 2, 3, 5, 6(a) and 7 (note that the numbering changed quite a bit between the original proposal and the currently published Parliament version). Unfortunately, you can't see on what grounds anything is rejected, because publicising this information is considered to potentially harm the internal Council negotiations...
Actually, a more recent (and more rigourous) empirical study concluded just the opposite:
The myth of the software patent thicket
Good. Then hopefully finally the real discussion can start, instead of endless moaning about computer programs as such, technical effects and personal desires to get rich.
Unfortunately, I won't have time to read it until the weekend:/
While the submarine-enforcement of the MP3 patent is bad, the actual patent is perfectly valid. Why shouldn't Fraunhofer IIS get royalties for the technology they paid for and developed.
There is no single MP3-patent, it's covered by a lot of patents. The basic one covers iterating *any* mathematical function over a sound sample until you can represent it in a desired number of bits. That's it. You can find the claim (in German) at the EPO, here's the English translation:
Digital coding process for transmitting and/or storing acoustic signals, specifically music signals, comprising the following steps.
N samples of the acoustic signal are converted into M spectral coefficients;
said M spectral coefficients are subjected to quantisation at a first level;
after coding by means of an entropic encoder the number of bits required to represent all the quantized spectral coefficients is checked;
when the required number of bits does not correspond to a specified number of bits quantization and coding are repeated in subsequent steps, each at a modified quantization level, until the number of bits required for representation reaches the specified number of bits, and
additionally to the data bits the required quantization level is transmitted and/or stored.
And that is the basic problem with software patents: there is no way you can put in the law that they can't be as abstract as this one. Even if you have some innovation in abstract reasoning that is such an achievement one could think about granting its discoverer a temporary monopoly, the resulting monopoly is way too large compared what was discovered.
If you can patent an improved screw head ("Torx(R) Plus"), why not an algorithm? If you developed a new compression technology or a new encryption technology, why is that any less of an invention than an improved screw head?
You are asking the wrong question. The correct one is "Will granting patents on new compression algorithms make sure that more and better compression algorithms will be developed?". All empirical studies carried out until now answer that question with either a "We don't know" or "NO!" (Bessen&Hunt, FTC study, European Commission Directorate General on Research study,...).
What we really need to fight are bad patents. Amazon's "one click" patent is one. Patents are *bad* when they are to broad or don't cover a real invention. But bad patents are a problem with the review system.
It's not just a problem with the review system, but with the patent system as a whole being unfit for monopolising advances in abstract reasoning. See this discussion between a programmer and the Deputy director of the UK patent office. The latter concludes with:
However, they [patent examiners who are also programmers] might express the communication problem the other way around - it's very difficult to persuade programmers that just because an invention is "easy", does not make it any less patentable.
Patents were never intended to sort out brilliant inventions from stupid ones. The "non-obvious" condition is simply not fit for that purpose.
This is so fitting with the Slashdot mentality that "software should be free" and that "copyright is bad".
I don't know about the rest of slashdot, but in case of software patents, the opponents are actually great proponents of copyright. The problem is that software patents completely undermine copyright. What good does it do that you have the right to sell you self-written program if even its publication is prohibited because someone own a software patent it infringes on?
I hate to tell you that this is not really a substantive limitation. Even if software can't be patented per se, it can still be patented by referring to the computer and software together, and including a technical effect of the invention. Either way, software is going to be patented.
You have obviously not even glanced at the text that the European Parliament approved. What you are talking about is the crap that the European Commission proposed and that the Council is trying to get back in (against which we are protesting now). The European Parliament closed all silly loopholes like that.
Actually, they do. That wealthy society exists because of the laws that protect all types of property. Think about how much wealth you could create without the law, then tell me who's creating the wealth. Law and lawyers create the system that supports the very possibility of a capitalist society.
The problem is that most lawyers don't see that there is a difference between the tangible and intangible world. You can't simply transpose rules from the one to the other and assume they will have the same (or even similar effects). Nevertheless, that's exactly what they do with software patents, ignoring the results of all empirical studies.
Just look at e.g. this study carried out by the Fraunhofer Institute for Intellectual Property no less. Look at the graphs, e.g. page 15. Companies use other things to protect software creations and to gain competitive advantages. Patents mainly introduce extra costs, strategic patenting and legal insecurity (because you never know whether you will be able to sell the product you are currently developing).
What they have in common, if you'll think about it for a moment, is that the author in one instance, and the engineer in the other, both have to work around previously existing works that are protected.
Copyright does not force anyone to work around anything. If two independent creations are identical, copyright protects both independent creations instead of the giving all rights to the first person to publish/claim it. That's the big problem with software patents: they completely undermine the rights an author gets from copyright (what good does it do that you are allowed to publish and sell your creations thanks to copyright, if at any time someone with a software patent can pop up and forbid it?).
houldn't sir_cello also google for and read other independant studies, not mentioned by the FFII?
IIRC there was a lot of moaning about M$'s independant studies that _they_ mentioned.
Btw, no I'm not accusing the FFII of trying to mislead their readers:)
Trust me, FFII doesn't have the funds to buy studies:)
Anyway, as far as I know macro-economical studies that show that software patents mainly have positive effects simply do not exist (while several that claim the reverse do exist). Virtually all people arguing in favor of software patents, are "IPR-specialists" (like sir_cello).
One can't blame them for trying to protect their job security, of course. It's sad that they try to present it as if they want the best for society as a whole as well, though (and that they combine it with mud slinging to FFII, because they can't refute its arguments).
Slashdot Mirror
Debugging backwards in time. See the Omniscient Debugger for an implementation in Java. Instead of re-executing the program a thousand times, each time setting breakpoints and watchpoints in different places to get nearer to the root cause of the problem, this debugger completely records all key events and lets you view the complete program state at any point in time.
Another reason to gradually and pro-actively swap things out, is that when another program later needs a lot of memory, your system doesn't come to a grinding halt because suddenly a lot of stuff has to be swapped out at once (followed by zeroing all that memory, since you don't want to have one program leaking data to another).
At least, that's the rationale I've read behind OS X's strategy of swapping things out long before all physical memory is used (and of keeping a pool of zeroed memory pages ready to fulfill most requests). Note that this does not require superfluous swap-ins if your reuse strategy is balanced properly, as the fact that something is swapped out doesn't mean that the memory which contained that data will be cleared/reused immediately (i.e., if it's needed again shortly afterwards, that page can be reactivated without having to go to disk).
Under most desktop OS'es, programs can even give some hints to the system regarding their usage of a memory region using e.g. the madvise() system call.
In the past, the whole of Costa Rica has already been blocked once because their national ISP (racsa.co.cr, which was (is?) the only one available) did nothing against Ralsky's bestiality and incest porn spamming via their networks and hosting his sites on their network.
And since this is in the "Your Rights Online" category: I think everyone has the right to refuse mail from anyone else. If an ISP uses this blocking list without properly informing his customers and without offering a way for his customers to opt-out of this kind, then this ISP is obviously at fault, not the people who publish the blacklist. The latter are simply like a consumer magazine that advises against buying a particular product because it performed very bad compared to other tested products.
Actually, they simply refuse to give licenses to small companies altogether, just read this message. As a litigation company, it costs them more to negotiate a license with a small company than what they could make from it, so they don't. It's completely independent from open source or not...
You are making a false distinction between a patent on "a computer program" and a patent on "a computer executing a computer program in its memory using a processing means and blablabla". There is no functional difference between the two, they boil down to exactly the same thing.
This is not just my opinion, it's literally what the EU Software Copyright Directive of 1991 says. It defined a computer program as literary work as
As you can see, the process executed by a computer program is identical to the computer program as such as far as this directive is concerned. This directive cannot be overruled by the patent professionals running the EPO.
Whether or not something is non-obvious has nothing to do with whether or not something is technical, except in EPO case law. Even juridically this trickery is not allowed by TRIPs: it states that the conditions for patentability must be the same for all inventions in all fields of technology. Therefore, if you insist on declaring algorithms interpreted by a computer as "inventions" and data processing as "a field of technology", then you cannot make special rules regarding the patentability of this kind of "inventions".
What is technical in your book? It's one of those words thrown around by everyone, but none of the proponents of software patents wants to define it. If you don't define it, it can mean anything and as such is an empty condition.
Indeed, and it's one of the reasons patents are traditionally not applied to the fields of mathematics, logical reasoning, business methods, computer programs etc. In those fields, almost all advances are baby steps and a programmer makes tens of those baby steps on an average working day. Giving monopolies on those baby steps is nefarious and does not serve any purpose: without the incentives offered by patents, they will be made as well because that's simply how things work in these fields.
Please finally read this page. It has nothing to do with incompetent examiners. Lack of documentation is part of the problem, but just a very small part. Technical means squat in the current patent jargon.
Suggesting that people should support this malpractice by working with the system, is like saying that a law which allows the police to lock up people based on merely a hint of suspicious activity is good, and instead of complaining about it, people should gather evidence that proves that wrongly locked up people are innocent, so they can be set free again by the authorities. It's just the world turned upside-down.
I also don't see why people should not complain about a system that is obviously broken, as e.g. the FTC's study showed. Mainly lawyers, some big companies and parasites like Eolas profit from it. Not a single economist is in favor, and the only "economical" study that shows they supposedly have positive effects until now has been carried out by a professor in law at a School of Law...
It really is the world turned upside down: there is a system which in general has bad economical and social effects (tons of overly broad patents, more often than not based on trivial innovations; stifled innovation in general; prejudice of the author's right; diverting of R&D budgets to juridical departments; ...), but according to you people should not complain and just keep on trying to patch the this obviously broken system. Why should it not go away?
The logical course of action is to first find some arguments why a certain IP-exclusion system applied toi a certain economical branch could be good in general, then research whether those arguments hold in practice and if so, only then introduce it. It's true that you have this strange system in place now, but claiming that people should just swallow this illogical system of monopolies (on logical reasonings no less) and not question its foundation (as far as there is any, except in law) does not make sense to me.
PS: please check also the link that Mr/Ms AC provided, it makes for really good reading on the issue of "good" and "bad" software patents
Of course, a lot of open source developers are independent developer (though not all, just think of e.g. IBM), but claiming it's somehow specific to the open source community is like claiming that nuclear explosions are unhealthy for pregnant women. It's true, but not telling half the story.
Everything that appears in the "description" part is simply the "invention" that justifies the fact that they got this right to exclude others from using run length encoding, but is otherwise completely independent from the monopoly they received.
Which even costs less than $US 2 million in most cases.
Together with copyright, lead time advantages, licensing, NDA's etc, they have a whole arsenal of means to protect their own creations, without hampering any other person's independent creation (unlike with software patents, where many other independent creations are hampered by one person's patent)
However, what they're not telling you is that reverse engineering/decompilation could never be prohibited by a patent in the first place! A patent prohibits you to use or exploit what is patented, not observing or analysing it. So they're including a provision in the software patent directive that gives you a right that you already had and which they can't take away.
As I said, a patent can be used to prohibit the use of a patented technique. So if you after all your reverse engineering work finally discover how to make your program interoperable with the other one, you can't actually implement this: after all, that would boil down to using the patented technique, which is not allowed by the Council/Commission version. So there is no interoperability guarantee whatsoever.
The European Parliament however explicitly stated that this should be allowed (with 393 against 35 votes, no less). Needless to say, the Council wants to remove this amendment.
Unfortunately, I won't have time to read it until the weekend :/
There is no single MP3-patent, it's covered by a lot of patents. The basic one covers iterating *any* mathematical function over a sound sample until you can represent it in a desired number of bits. That's it. You can find the claim (in German) at the EPO, here's the English translation:
And that is the basic problem with software patents: there is no way you can put in the law that they can't be as abstract as this one. Even if you have some innovation in abstract reasoning that is such an achievement one could think about granting its discoverer a temporary monopoly, the resulting monopoly is way too large compared what was discovered.
You are asking the wrong question. The correct one is "Will granting patents on new compression algorithms make sure that more and better compression algorithms will be developed?". All empirical studies carried out until now answer that question with either a "We don't know" or "NO!" (Bessen&Hunt, FTC study, European Commission Directorate General on Research study, ...).
It's not just a problem with the review system, but with the patent system as a whole being unfit for monopolising advances in abstract reasoning. See this discussion between a programmer and the Deputy director of the UK patent office. The latter concludes with:
Patents were never intended to sort out brilliant inventions from stupid ones. The "non-obvious" condition is simply not fit for that purpose.
I don't know about the rest of slashdot, but in case of software patents, the opponents are actually great proponents of copyright. The problem is that software patents completely undermine copyright. What good does it do that you have the right to sell you self-written program if even its publication is prohibited because someone own a software patent it infringes on?
Read for yourself, especially articles 2 and 3.
The problem is that most lawyers don't see that there is a difference between the tangible and intangible world. You can't simply transpose rules from the one to the other and assume they will have the same (or even similar effects). Nevertheless, that's exactly what they do with software patents, ignoring the results of all empirical studies.Just look at e.g. this study carried out by the Fraunhofer Institute for Intellectual Property no less. Look at the graphs, e.g. page 15. Companies use other things to protect software creations and to gain competitive advantages. Patents mainly introduce extra costs, strategic patenting and legal insecurity (because you never know whether you will be able to sell the product you are currently developing).
Copyright does not force anyone to work around anything. If two independent creations are identical, copyright protects both independent creations instead of the giving all rights to the first person to publish/claim it. That's the big problem with software patents: they completely undermine the rights an author gets from copyright (what good does it do that you are allowed to publish and sell your creations thanks to copyright, if at any time someone with a software patent can pop up and forbid it?).Anyway, as far as I know macro-economical studies that show that software patents mainly have positive effects simply do not exist (while several that claim the reverse do exist). Virtually all people arguing in favor of software patents, are "IPR-specialists" (like sir_cello).
One can't blame them for trying to protect their job security, of course. It's sad that they try to present it as if they want the best for society as a whole as well, though (and that they combine it with mud slinging to FFII, because they can't refute its arguments).