But perhaps you've heard this before 'If medical research were left up to the government we'd have best iron lung in the world but not a polio vaccine.'
If someone does indeed say that, it appears that he is wrong.
The polio vaccine was discovered by Dr. Jonas Salk, who was a medical researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. Much of the funding came through the "March of Dimes", which was a grassroots organization founded by president Roosevelt.
So the polio vaccine was in fact developed through public funding rather than by the big pharma companies. And it still counts as one of the biggest medical achievements ever, if you look at the number of people that it saved.
Possibly because the vaccine could be produced freely once it had been discovered, since it was not restricted by patents.
I apologize for not having a more complete translation of our proposal ready, but this is the basic idea.
At least in Europe, over 80% of the pharma companies' revenues come from the government (since we have universal medical coverage). The pharma companies claim that they have to charge several times more than the production costs in order to fund research. But they only spend 15% of their revenues on research. Most of the money they receive from the government actually goes to marketing (around 50%) and profit (around 15%).
If the government would fund research and the buying of the pills separately, the total bill would drop by at least 50%, since there would be no need for the excessive marketing any more. And there would be no need to keep the research results blocked by patents, since they would have been paid for already.
So there would be no need to threaten third world countries with economic sanctions just because they try to do what they can to provide AIDS medicine to their own population.
Unfortunately our server has gone down right now (overload, not police raid), so I'll post the English description of our political agenda here.
The Pirate Party
The Pirate Party is a newly formed political party in Sweden. We want to fundamentally reform copyright law, get rid of the patent system, and ensure that citizens' rights to privacy are respected. With this agenda, and only this, we are making a bid for representation in the Swedish parliament in the upcoming national elections in September.
Not only do we think these are worthwhile goals. We also believe they are realistically achievable on a European basis. The sentiments that led to the formation of the Pirate Party in Sweden are present throughout Europe. There are already similar political initiatives under way in several other member states. Together, we will be able to set a new course for a Europe that is currently heading in a very dangerous direction.
The Pirate Party only has three issues on its agenda:
Reform of copyright law
The official aim of the copyright system has always been to find a balance between the interests of publishers and consumers, in order to promote culture being created and spread. Today that balance has been completely lost, to a point where the copyright laws severely restrict the very thing they are supposed to promote. The Pirate Party wants to restore the balance in the copyright legislation.
All non-commercial copying and use should be completely free. File sharing and p2p networking should be encouraged rather than criminalized. Culture and knowledge are good things, that increase in value the more they are shared. The Internet could become the greatest public library ever created.
The monopoly for the copyright holder to exploit an aesthetic work commercially should be limited to five years after publication. Today's copyright terms are simply absurd. Nobody needs to make money seventy years after he is dead. No film studio or record company bases its investment decisions on the off-chance that the product would be of interest to anyone a hundred years in the future. The commercial life of cultural works is staggeringly short in today's world. If you haven't made your money back in the first one or two years, you never will. A five years copyright term for commercial use is more than enough. Non-commercial use should be free from day one.
We also want a complete ban on DRM technologies, and on contract clauses that aim to restrict the consumers' legal rights in this area. There is no point in restoring balance and reason to the legislation, if at the same time we continue to allow the big media companies to both write and enforce their own arbitrary laws.
An abolished patent system
Pharmaceutical patents kill people in third world countries every day. They hamper possibly life saving research by forcing scientists to lock up their findings pending patent application, instead of sharing them with the rest of the scientific community. The latest example of this is the bird flu virus, where not even the threat of a global pandemic can make research institutions forgo their chance to make a killing on patents.
The Pirate Party has a constructive and reasoned proposal for an alternative to pharmaceutical patents. It would not only solve these problems, but also give more money to pharmaceutical research, while still cutting public spending on medicines in half. This is something we would like to discuss on a European level.
Patents in other areas range from the morally repulsive (like patents on living organisms) through the seriously harmful (patents on software and business methods) to the merely pointless (patents in the mature manufacturing industries).
Europe has all to gain and nothing to lose by abolishing patents outright. If we lead, the rest of the world will eventually follow.
Respect for the right to privacy
Following the 9/11 event in the US, Europe has
[Under VMS] most of the commands were reasonably self-descriptive, and you could usually find what you wanted in help without too much trouble.
Yes, I loved VMS too.
When I first made contact with the command lines in both Windows and Unix, I was quite frankly shocked at how poorly either of them compared to DCL (Digital Command Language) under the VMS operating system.
Coming from VMS, I found the Unix command line syntax incredibly unintuitive, inconsistent, and just plain inconvenient. I know that the reason for this is that the various parts of it were designed and implemeted by different people at different times for different reasons. But the end result is just messy.
Under Windows, I found the command syntax more reasonable and sometimes even sensible. But here the problem was another one. Things that I naively thought were available on every platform, simply weren't there when I looked for them. Trying to replicate what would have been very easy in a DCL batch file under VMS, was either impossible or required lots of clever or complicated tricks.
It is of course easy to say that the system you know well always feels more senisble than a new one that you are trying to learn, and that is certainly true. But even so, I still think that the consistency and sheer good design of DCL did put it in another division than either Unix or Windows.
Anyway, if you're like me and still miss VMS though you now work under Windows or Linux, please feel free to have a look at my open source project Glindra. It is a set of command line utilities that run under Windows or Linux, and try to recreate the flavor of the VMS commands dir, copy, rename, delete and purge. They support
file version numbers and the *** directory wildcard
(meaning all subdirectories), much like VMS.
Other aspects, such as option names that can be truncated as long as
they are unique, and suboptions within parentheses, are also inspired by
VMS.
You can browse the documentation at doc.glindra.org to decide if you want to download and try them out.
[P]atent clerks screw up (possibly even more than most people since I hear being a patent clerk is a crappy job).
The main problem is not that the patent clerks are stupid or incompetent or anything like that. In fact, most of them probably aren't.
Instead it is the economic incentives built into the system that ensure that the patent office will continue to grant more and more obvious patents.
Nowadays most patent offices around the world are already "self funded", so the fees go back to the patent office. This means that the patent office has an incetive to grant as many patents as it possibly can.
A look at the USPTO fee list [uspto.gov]USPTO Fee Schedule explains the underlying math.
The basic application fee for a patent is $300, but you also have to pay a "search fee" of $500 and an "examination fee" of $200, making it a total of $1000 for making an application. But in order to collect that money, the patent office has to do quite a lot of work: set up a file, do an initial formal examination, perform a novelty search, and quite often engage in correspondence with the applicant to sort out various issues. It seems reasonable to assume that initial applications "as such" do not cover their own costs for the patent office.
But once a patent has been granted, nice things start to happen to the patent office's profitability calculations.
At the moment the patent is granted, the proprietor has to pay $1400 in "issuance fee".
Then, in order to keep his patent valid, he has to pay maintenance fees at regular intervals. $900 is due at 3.5 years after it was granted, $2,300 due at 7.5 years, and $3,800 due at 11.5 years.
For a patent that is renewed throughout its full term, the post-allowance and maintenance fees add up to $8,400, compared to the $1000 for the initial application.
And the renewal fees are the good part of the patent office business, since the PTO doesn't actually have to do anything for the money, except make a note in the file that the fee has been paid. So for those patent offices around the world that are funded in whole or in part by the fees they collect, there is a direct incentive to let the standards slip to the lowest level they can possibly get away with.
The result can be seen at a patent office near you.
If you don't want patents, then the alternative is government R&D labs, possible using outsourced development services.
I think you are making a very valuable point here, that deserves to be highlighted.
Often, when you listen to patent proponents/apologists, they will paint a picture suggesting that if there were no patents, there would be no pharmaceutical reserch at all carried out in the world. This is of course pure rubbish.
Just as you point out, the governments of the first world countries could just as well fund the research directly if they wanted. They have the power to decide if the want to have patents or not, and if they want to spend precious police resources on enforcing them. And it is the governments who are footing most of the pharmaceutical bill anyway, through Medicare/Medicaid in the US, and through universal medical coverage in Europe, Canada and Japan.
So there is no natural law that says that patents are the only way to get new drugs developed. If governments were to fund the research directly and make the results freely available, that would be at least as reasonable a model as the current one, with state enforced monopolies for the pharmaceutical companies.
The relevant question to ask is which model would provide the cheapest and most efficient way to fund pharmaceutical research. You are touching on this subject when you write:
[T]he development services would charge a pretty penny for their work
This is no doubt true, as nobody has ever claimed that it is cheap to research new drugs.
However, considering that it already is the governments that are providing most of the income for the pharmaceutical industry, a first step would be to examine how much of the money actually goes to research.
This is very easily done, since all the big pharma companies have their annual reports available on the web. As an example, I googled Novartis and had a look at their numbers.
They spend 15% of their revenue on research. The other 85% goes to other stuff, according to their own figures. The numbers are typical for the industry.
So the question is: is the patent system really giving us, the taxpayers, the maximum amount of medical research for the money we are spending on drugs? Or is there room for improvement, when even the pharma companies themselves admit to spending 85% of the money we give them on other things?
I'm not necessarily saying I have the answer, but I think it's a question well worth asking.
FFII, Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, has issued the following press release today regarding this matter:
PRESS RELEASE FFII -- [ Europe / ICT / Information Society ]
EU adopts Big Brother directive, ignores industry and civil society
14 December 2005 (Strasbourg, France) The European Parliament today
adopted a directive that will create the largest monitoring database
in the world, tracking all communications within the EU. "From today,
all EU citizens are to be tracked and monitored like common
criminals," says Pieter Hintjens, president of the FFII.
The Data Retention Directive was passed by 378 votes to 197, following
deals between the Council and the leaders of the two largest parties
in Parliament, the EPP-ED (Conservatives) and the PSE (Socialists).
The Rapporteur for the directive, Alexander Alvaro (Liberals) had his
name removed from the report in protest.
Jonas Maebe of the FFII says: "Among other harsh measures, the
directive mandates recording of the source and destination of all
emails you send and every call you make, and your location and
movement during mobile phone calls. Additionally, the directive says
nothing about who has to pay for all this logging, which will
significantly distort the internal telecommunications market."
"Moreover, the directive disregards how Internet protocols work. For
example, tracking Internet telephony calls is generally impossible
without closely watching the content of all data packets. The reason
is that such connections are not necessarily set up via a central
server which can perform the necessary logging. On top of that you
have techniques like tunneling (VPN's) which make it simply impossible
to look at the content", he adds.
The gathered data can be made available without special warrants, and
without limit to certain types of crime. There will be no independent
evaluation, and no extra privacy and no specific security safeguards.
The data will be retained for periods ranging from 6 months up to any
duration a member state can convince the Commission of.
Hartmut Pilch of the FFII says: "This outcome proves that we have to
remain vigilant at all times and work on every relevant directive from
the start. Even now, the planned IPRED2 directive, also unanimously
condemned by industry and civil society, threatens to turn everyone
caught by a patent into a criminal."
The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) is a
non-profit association registered in several European countries, which
is dedicated to the spread of data processing literacy. FFII supports
the development of public information goods based on copyright, free
competition, open standards. More than 850 members, 3,000 companies
and 90,000 supporters h
HTML along the lines of using h1 through h6 is foolish, but I've (literally) never seen anyone use any heading smaller than h2.
I use all 6 heading sizes in the documentation I am writing for my open source project, and I don't think it looks that bad. Sure, I could have used some complicated/sophisticated publishing system that did all the layout as flash animations or whatever, but I think it's an advantage to be able to write the documentation as straight-forward text files that can be included in the tar-ball and that anyone can read with any browser.
Different headings are quite useful when you're trying to make documentation readable, so I really don't understand what the author of the article (and possibly you) have against them.
I don't want to boost their Google ranking by making the link clickable, but if you want to check out the Campaign for Creativity site for yourself, it is at www.campaignforcreativity.org
Note that the "www" is reqired. If you just type in campaignforcreativity.org you instead get to a page that promotes the "Advocacy Online" service that the lobbying firm provides.
[Microsoft would] rather feed smear stories to the press and buy off politicians than give their customers what they want
When they don't have any actual arguments to fight with, what else can they do?
Another Microsoft backed lobbying effort was the fake grass roots movement "Campaign for Creativity", which tried to convince the European Parliament to introduce software patents in Europe, by pretending to represent "artists, designers, writers, photographers, software developers, musicians, engineers, inventors". In reality it was just a site put up by the lobbying firm Campbell Gentry, and financed by companies like Microsoft and SAP.
The "winner" will be selected by an open Internet poll. If you want to donate a mouse-click to the fight against software patents and the companies that try to introduce them by corrupting the political system, you can go to the site and vote online.
The award is organized by a number of watchdog groups that are working for cleaner and more transparent methods in politics, so although the award as such sounds a bit humorous, the underlying issues are quite serious.
There is an overwhelming risk that Europe will get the same kind of privacy invading legislation through the Data Retention Directive.
If you are a European citizen you can sign a petition against the directive here.
According to a joint newspaper article by Swedish MEPs Charlotte Cederschiöld (conservative) and Jonas Sjöstedt (socialist) that was published some months ago, the only thing that can stop the directive is feedback to the politicians from the general public on the same scale as the software patents directive generated. I don't know if they are right in their assessment, but signing the petition against the directive is at least a first step.
Personally, I would also like to see the European ISPs becoming more active and start spending some real money on lobbying.
As long as it's only the old dinosaurs with pre-Internet business models that are spending lobbying money in Brussels/Washington/Ottawa/Canberra, we will continue to see bad pieces of legislation getting passed everywhere. It's time for a new generation of businesses to realize that politics don't take care of themselves, and that if you let the bad guys' lobbyists rein unopposed, there is a bill to be paid for it later.
[...] exponentially increasing fees per year to maintain a patent (proceeds from this being directed back into the patent office to afford better review of the patent applications)
I agree that that idea may appear at first sight to be helpful in raising the quality of patents, but in real life it has the exact opposite effect. And what is worse, it has already been implemented.
Nowadays most patent offices around the world are already "self funded", so the fees do already go back to the patent office. And the proprietor of a patent already has to pay maintenance fees to keep it valid. But this is part of the problem, since it invariably leads to lower and lower standards.
A look at the USPTO fee listUSPTO Fee Schedule explains the underlying math.
The basic application fee for a patent is $300, but you also have to pay a "search fee" of $500 and an "examination fee" of $200, making it a total of $1000 for making an application. But in order to collect that money, the patent office has to do quite a lot of work: set up a file, do an initial formal examination, perform a novelty search, and quite often engage in correspondence with the applicant to sort out various issues. It seems reasonable to assume that initial applications "as such" do not cover their own costs for the patent office.
But once a patent has been granted, nice things start to happen to the patent office's profitability calculations.
At the moment the patent is granted, the proprietor has to pay $1400 in "issuance fee".
Then, in order to keep his patent valid, he has to pay maintenance fees at regular intervals. $900 is due at 3.5 years after it was granted, $2,300 due at 7.5 years, and $3,800 due at 11.5 years.
For a patent that is renewed throughout its full term, the post-allowance and maintenance fees add up to $8,400, compared to the $1000 for the initial application.
And the renewal fees are the good part of the patent office business, since the PTO doesn't actually have to do anything for the money, except make a note in the file that the fee has been paid. So for those patent offices around the world that are funded in whole or in part by the fees they collect, there is a direct incentive to let the standards slip to the lowest level they can possibly get away with.
The result can be seen at a patent office near you.
(This post is essentially a repost of a reply I made in another patent discussion a couple of days ago, with some minor changes in the numbers, as I had missed some of the fees in the original post. But the logic remains exactly the same.)
Like it or not, [patents are] also a way to encourage innovation.
Do you have anything at all that supports that opinion? Can you provide a link to any reputable study, theortical or practical, that suggests that software patents do in fact encourage innovation?
You can find links to a dozen or so studies that come to the conclusion that software patents are in fact harmful to innovation and the economy as a whole here.
So why does the patent office keep on granting so many obviously stupid patents?
It is not primarily because the patent examiners are incompetent, as is often suggested. Instead it is the economics of running a patent office that make sure that it becomes like this.
Nowadays most patent offices around the world are "self funded", which means that they are funded by the fees that the collect from the patent applicants. This may perhaps seem like a sensible idea at first sight, but unfortunately it invariably leads to lower and lower standards for what is patentable.
The initial application fee for a patent is $300. In order to collect that money, the patent office has to do quite a lot of work: set up a file, do an initial formal examination, perform a novelty search, and quite often engage in correspondence with the applicant to sort out various issues. It seems reasonable to assume that initial applications "as such" do not cover their own costs for the patent office.
But once a patent has been granted, nice things start to happen to the patent office's profitability calculations.
In order to keep his patent valid, the proprietor has to pay maintenance fees at regular intervals. $900 is due at 3.5 years after it was granted, $2,300 due at 7.5 years, and $3,800 due at 11.5 years.
For a patent that is renewed throughout its full term, the maintenance fees add up to $7,000, compared to the $300 for the initial application.
And the renewal fees are the good part of the patent office business, since the PTO doesn't actually have to do anything for the money, except make a note in the file that the fee has been paid. So for those patent offices around the world that are funded in whole or in part by the fees they collect, there is a direct incentive to let the standards slip to the lowest level they can possibly get away with.
The result can be seen at a patent office near you.
At least we know who will go for the patent for acquiring patents on movie plots. It'll be these enterprising young lawyers.
This decision is quite funny. A couple of months ago, Slashdot was running a story about a piece by Richard Stallman where he made the analogy with the works of Victor Hugo being covered by patents on literary plots. Then there were some posters who thought Dr. Stallman was making an absurd comparison, and that patents on literature would never happen.
Well, well...
Meanwhile, in Europe, we have chosen another road. After the victory on July 6, when the European Parliament rejected the software directive, we now have a chance to get one of our activists to win the title "European of the Year" in an open Internet poll organized by a big business magazine.
Please feel free to go to NoSoftwarePatents.com for instructions on how to vote, while you contemplate this latest madness by the US patent establishment.
Yes, I know, this is/. & we have a million examples of patents stifling innovation... but no legitimate analysis.
When it comes to software patents, there are actually quite a lot of studies that conclude that software patents are bad for innovation, and for society in general.
You can start by having a look at these ones, for example:
"Stronger IP protection is not always better. Chances are that patents on software, common practice in the US and on the brink of being legalised in Europe, in fact stifle innovation. Europe could still alter course"
"The mild regime of IP protection in the past has led to a very innovative and competitive software industry with low entry barriers. A software patent, which serves to protect inventions of a non-technical nature, could kill the high innovation rate."
"More patents in more industries and with greater breadth are not always the best ways to maximize consumer welfare."
"Many panelists and participants expressed the view that software and Internet patents are impeding innovation. They stated that such patents are impairing follow-on incentives, increasing entry barriers, creating uncertainty that harms incentives to invest in innovation, and producing patent thickets. Panelists discussed how defensive patenting increases the complexity of patent thickets and forces companies to divert resources from R&D into obtaining patents. Commentators noted that patent thickets make it more difficult to commercialize new products and raise uncertainty and investment risks. Some panelists also noted that hold-up has become a problem that can result in higher prices being passed along to consumers."
The FFII has a list of further studies that you can have a look at here.
Now, perhaps I can turn the questions around. Can anybody provide a link to a single reputable study that concludes that software patents are necessary or good for society?
If so, please do.
But to the best of my knowledge there isn't any such study, so please don't feel embarassed if you can't.:-)
This award for the anti software patents movement is both very welcome and very well deserved. When the European Parliament rejected software patents on July 6, it was a great victory. Not only for the open source movement, but for all European businesses that use or produce software. It is nice to see this recognized in this manner.
One To Win
We also have a chance of winning another award in recognition of all activists who have spent countless hours on making the swpat victory happen.
The founder of NoSoftwarePatents.com Florian Müller has been nominated as a candidate for the title "European of the Year" in an open Internet poll organized by
The European Voice, a weekly magazine that focuses on EU politics.
If he wins either the big "European of the Year" award, or the category "Campaigner of the Year" where he is also nominated, it would be a nice PR victory for the anti-swpat movement.
Also nominated in the "MEP of the Year" category is Michel Rochard, the former French Prime Minister who championed our cause as rapporteur in the European Parliament, where we won on July 6.
If you want to donate a few mouseclicks to the fight against software patents, you can go to and register your vote. Only one vote per person.
Note that you have to vote in all the categories, or your vote will be disqualified. For the most part it doesn't matter who you choose in the other categories, but there are a few bad apples (from an anti-swpat perspective), so here are some suggestions. But it's Campaigner, MEP, and European of the Year that are the important ones.
1) Commissioner of the Year: Don't vote for Charlie McGreevy, who is the commissioner who tried to ram software patents down Europe's throat.
2) MEP of the Year:
Vote for Michel Rochard, who won for us in Parliament.
3) Statesman of the Year: Avoid Blair, Schröder, and Juncker because of how their respective governments behaved over the directive (especially Juncker, Luxembourg). This leaves the candidates from Italy, Poland or Spain to choose from.
4) Diplomat of the Year: Don't vote for Nicolas Schmitt, who is part of the Luxembourg government that handled the swpat issue so disgracefully and anti-democratically during the Luxembourg EU Presidency.
5) Campaigner of the Year:
Vote for Florian Müller, NoSoftwarePatents.com
6) Business Leader of the Year:
Pick one.
7) Journalist of the Year:
Pick one.
8) Achiever of the Year:
Pick one.
9) Non-EU Citizen of the Year:
Pick one.
10) European of the Year:
Vote for Florian Müller, NoSoftwarePatents.com
Although one could argue that Michel Rochard would be just as worthy from our perspective, I think it sends a stronger and clearer message if one of our activists wins the award, rather than a politician that is involved in many other issues as well. As it would be very damaging to our chances of winning the most prestigious of the awards if the anti-swpat vote is split on two candidates, my recommendation is Florian Müller only.
For more information about the nominees, see the presentations at the award site here.
The poll closes on November 11, and the
award will be handed out at a gala dinner hosted by former EU Parliament president Pat Cox later that month.
And it bounced since the patents had to be done in only one language (english) and the french wanted them in french too.
Somehow I think there will be a retry of a new proposal anyway.
No, you're confusing the software patents directive, which was thrown out by the European Parliament on July 6, with the Community Patent, which is indeed in some sort of limbo over the language issue.
But I agree with you that it would be naive and foolish to think that the proponents of software patents have all given up and gone home now.
They just lost a really major battle in Europe, yes. But they haven't run out of lobbying money yet, so I too would expect them to try again in some other way.
Terrorist organisations which have been defeated as a result of governments trying to "take them out"
Rote Arme-Fraktion (the Baader-Meinhof crowd in Germany in the 70s) would probably be another example.
But I agree with you, the list of examples where heavy-handed tactics from the authorities have failed to produce the promised results, or indeed been contra-productive, is much much longer.
And of course they didn't stop Baader-Meinhof by carpet bombing the major German cities.
I wish more people would read Henry Kissinger's fantastic book "Diplomacy" before they start suggesting drastic anti-terrorist measures. He, if anybody, knows first hand the limitations of that kind of strategy, and he explains them in a lucid and intellectually dispassionate way that it is a joy to read.
And I haven't heard anybody call Dr. Kissinger a soft liberal leftie yet.;-)
The provisions of paragraph 2 shall exclude patentability of the subject-matter or activities referred to in that provision only to the extent to which a European patent application or European patent relates to such subject-matter or activities as such.
But can you explain why the phrase "as such" (which doesn't really have very much meaning at all in normal English) should be interpreted in so fundamentally different ways when it's applied to computer programs as opposed to other things that are listed in Article 52.2, like films, books, or other aesthetic creations?
The text "Why can't I patent my movie?" expands on this question. So far, I haven't recieved one single sensible answer from any patent proponent or apologist.
consistent, so that you could actually memorize commands and their options
Those were the days.
I apologize for being an old fart, but having spent the last five years with Windows as my primary OS (after having been on VMS since 1985), I'm still emphatically unimpressed with what goes for "modern technology".
Of course there are things you can do on Windows or Unix that simply weren't available on VMS. But when it comes to reliability and sheer good design, I still very much miss VMS.
This is almost a total victory for the opponents of software patents.
The patent lobby tried to sneak in software patents through the back door, by claiming that it was only about harmonization, that the directive wouldn't change anything, etc, etc. They failed.
The issue has led to the most intensive lobbying campaign ever in Brussels (from both sides). Whatever their position on the issue "as such" may be, there is not a single member of the European Parliament who now thinks that this is "just a small technical matter that can safely be left to the patent experts to decide on".
If the patent lobby wants to continue working for the legalization of patents on software and business methods (and they will), they will have to engage in a serious debate about the benefit/harm of such patents. And since they don't really have any arguments that can stand scrutiny in daylight, they will have a very difficult time.
Sure, the FFII would have preferred a directive that reaffirmed the ban on software patents in Article 52 of the European Patent Convention, and led to greater harmonization in Europe. Alas, that didn't happen, because the patent lobby got cold feet and preferred to kill the directive rather than risk a vote in Parliament that they would probably have lost.
But at least we didn't get a bad directive that wiped out Article 52 and forced national parliaments to introduce software patents against their will. The situation now is that software patents are illegal in Europe (as they always have been according to the EPC), but that we still have a European Patent Office that needs to be reined in so that it starts to follow the law.
But the law remains unchanged, and computer programs and methods of doing business are not considered patentable inventions.
Today was a great day in the battle for a free and open information infrastructure, and for a favorable business environment in Europe for enterprises that use or produce software.
But the hole in the formula you describe is the missing proof that certified patents are cheaper than those denied. They still keep the fee on denied patents.
Ah, but once the patent is granted, the patent holder will have to pay renewal, or "maintenance", fees at regular intervals. If the patent is denied, it won't be renewed, so there will be no renewal fees for the PTO to collect.
$900 due at 3.5 years after it was granted, $2,300 due at 7.5 years, and $3,800 due at 11.5 years. Compared to the $300 for the initial application, if I read the fee list correctly.
And the renewal fees are the good part of the patent office business, since the PTO doesn't actually have to do anything for the money, except make a note in the file that the fee has been paid. So for those patent offices around the world that are funded in whole or in part by the fees they collect, there is a direct incentive to let the standards slip to the lowest level they can possibly get away with.
[T]he woman who writes the Harry Potter books ought to be able to patent stories about magical school kids.
You didn't think that just because the idea is preposterous, the patent people haven't already thought of it?
Here is a link to a firm of US patent lawyers that are trying to expand patentability into plot elements in novels as well:
http://www.plotpatents.com/
And after all, why shouldn't they? If they succeed, it means increased revenues for patent lawyers. If literature, freedom of expression, or society at large happen to lose as a consequence, do you think they care?
Slashdot Mirror
The polio vaccine was discovered by Dr. Jonas Salk, who was a medical researcher at the University of Pittsburgh. Much of the funding came through the "March of Dimes", which was a grassroots organization founded by president Roosevelt.
So the polio vaccine was in fact developed through public funding rather than by the big pharma companies. And it still counts as one of the biggest medical achievements ever, if you look at the number of people that it saved.
Possibly because the vaccine could be produced freely once it had been discovered, since it was not restricted by patents.
References:
PBS: A Science Odyssey
"Access Excellence" at The National Health Museum
I apologize for not having a more complete translation of our proposal ready, but this is the basic idea.
At least in Europe, over 80% of the pharma companies' revenues come from the government (since we have universal medical coverage). The pharma companies claim that they have to charge several times more than the production costs in order to fund research. But they only spend 15% of their revenues on research. Most of the money they receive from the government actually goes to marketing (around 50%) and profit (around 15%).
If the government would fund research and the buying of the pills separately, the total bill would drop by at least 50%, since there would be no need for the excessive marketing any more. And there would be no need to keep the research results blocked by patents, since they would have been paid for already.
So there would be no need to threaten third world countries with economic sanctions just because they try to do what they can to provide AIDS medicine to their own population.
When I first made contact with the command lines in both Windows and Unix, I was quite frankly shocked at how poorly either of them compared to DCL (Digital Command Language) under the VMS operating system.
Coming from VMS, I found the Unix command line syntax incredibly unintuitive, inconsistent, and just plain inconvenient. I know that the reason for this is that the various parts of it were designed and implemeted by different people at different times for different reasons. But the end result is just messy.
Under Windows, I found the command syntax more reasonable and sometimes even sensible. But here the problem was another one. Things that I naively thought were available on every platform, simply weren't there when I looked for them. Trying to replicate what would have been very easy in a DCL batch file under VMS, was either impossible or required lots of clever or complicated tricks.
It is of course easy to say that the system you know well always feels more senisble than a new one that you are trying to learn, and that is certainly true. But even so, I still think that the consistency and sheer good design of DCL did put it in another division than either Unix or Windows.
Anyway, if you're like me and still miss VMS though you now work under Windows or Linux, please feel free to have a look at my open source project Glindra. It is a set of command line utilities that run under Windows or Linux, and try to recreate the flavor of the VMS commands dir, copy, rename, delete and purge. They support file version numbers and the *** directory wildcard (meaning all subdirectories), much like VMS.
Other aspects, such as option names that can be truncated as long as they are unique, and suboptions within parentheses, are also inspired by VMS.
You can browse the documentation at doc.glindra.org to decide if you want to download and try them out.
Instead it is the economic incentives built into the system that ensure that the patent office will continue to grant more and more obvious patents.
Nowadays most patent offices around the world are already "self funded", so the fees go back to the patent office. This means that the patent office has an incetive to grant as many patents as it possibly can.
A look at the USPTO fee list [uspto.gov]USPTO Fee Schedule explains the underlying math.
The basic application fee for a patent is $300, but you also have to pay a "search fee" of $500 and an "examination fee" of $200, making it a total of $1000 for making an application. But in order to collect that money, the patent office has to do quite a lot of work: set up a file, do an initial formal examination, perform a novelty search, and quite often engage in correspondence with the applicant to sort out various issues. It seems reasonable to assume that initial applications "as such" do not cover their own costs for the patent office.
But once a patent has been granted, nice things start to happen to the patent office's profitability calculations.
At the moment the patent is granted, the proprietor has to pay $1400 in "issuance fee". Then, in order to keep his patent valid, he has to pay maintenance fees at regular intervals. $900 is due at 3.5 years after it was granted, $2,300 due at 7.5 years, and $3,800 due at 11.5 years.
For a patent that is renewed throughout its full term, the post-allowance and maintenance fees add up to $8,400, compared to the $1000 for the initial application.
And the renewal fees are the good part of the patent office business, since the PTO doesn't actually have to do anything for the money, except make a note in the file that the fee has been paid. So for those patent offices around the world that are funded in whole or in part by the fees they collect, there is a direct incentive to let the standards slip to the lowest level they can possibly get away with.
The result can be seen at a patent office near you.
Often, when you listen to patent proponents/apologists, they will paint a picture suggesting that if there were no patents, there would be no pharmaceutical reserch at all carried out in the world. This is of course pure rubbish.
Just as you point out, the governments of the first world countries could just as well fund the research directly if they wanted. They have the power to decide if the want to have patents or not, and if they want to spend precious police resources on enforcing them. And it is the governments who are footing most of the pharmaceutical bill anyway, through Medicare/Medicaid in the US, and through universal medical coverage in Europe, Canada and Japan.
So there is no natural law that says that patents are the only way to get new drugs developed. If governments were to fund the research directly and make the results freely available, that would be at least as reasonable a model as the current one, with state enforced monopolies for the pharmaceutical companies.
The relevant question to ask is which model would provide the cheapest and most efficient way to fund pharmaceutical research. You are touching on this subject when you write:
This is no doubt true, as nobody has ever claimed that it is cheap to research new drugs.However, considering that it already is the governments that are providing most of the income for the pharmaceutical industry, a first step would be to examine how much of the money actually goes to research.
This is very easily done, since all the big pharma companies have their annual reports available on the web. As an example, I googled Novartis and had a look at their numbers.
They spend 15% of their revenue on research. The other 85% goes to other stuff, according to their own figures. The numbers are typical for the industry.
So the question is: is the patent system really giving us, the taxpayers, the maximum amount of medical research for the money we are spending on drugs? Or is there room for improvement, when even the pharma companies themselves admit to spending 85% of the money we give them on other things?
I'm not necessarily saying I have the answer, but I think it's a question well worth asking.
Different headings are quite useful when you're trying to make documentation readable, so I really don't understand what the author of the article (and possibly you) have against them.
Note that the "www" is reqired. If you just type in campaignforcreativity.org you instead get to a page that promotes the "Advocacy Online" service that the lobbying firm provides.
Another Microsoft backed lobbying effort was the fake grass roots movement "Campaign for Creativity", which tried to convince the European Parliament to introduce software patents in Europe, by pretending to represent "artists, designers, writers, photographers, software developers, musicians, engineers, inventors". In reality it was just a site put up by the lobbying firm Campbell Gentry, and financed by companies like Microsoft and SAP.
This (failed) lobbying effort has how been nominated as one of the contenders for the "Worst EU Lobbying Award" 2005.
The "winner" will be selected by an open Internet poll. If you want to donate a mouse-click to the fight against software patents and the companies that try to introduce them by corrupting the political system, you can go to the site and vote online.
The award is organized by a number of watchdog groups that are working for cleaner and more transparent methods in politics, so although the award as such sounds a bit humorous, the underlying issues are quite serious.
If you are a European citizen you can sign a petition against the directive here.
According to a joint newspaper article by Swedish MEPs Charlotte Cederschiöld (conservative) and Jonas Sjöstedt (socialist) that was published some months ago, the only thing that can stop the directive is feedback to the politicians from the general public on the same scale as the software patents directive generated. I don't know if they are right in their assessment, but signing the petition against the directive is at least a first step.
Personally, I would also like to see the European ISPs becoming more active and start spending some real money on lobbying.
As long as it's only the old dinosaurs with pre-Internet business models that are spending lobbying money in Brussels/Washington/Ottawa/Canberra, we will continue to see bad pieces of legislation getting passed everywhere. It's time for a new generation of businesses to realize that politics don't take care of themselves, and that if you let the bad guys' lobbyists rein unopposed, there is a bill to be paid for it later.
Nowadays most patent offices around the world are already "self funded", so the fees do already go back to the patent office. And the proprietor of a patent already has to pay maintenance fees to keep it valid. But this is part of the problem, since it invariably leads to lower and lower standards.
A look at the USPTO fee listUSPTO Fee Schedule explains the underlying math.
The basic application fee for a patent is $300, but you also have to pay a "search fee" of $500 and an "examination fee" of $200, making it a total of $1000 for making an application. But in order to collect that money, the patent office has to do quite a lot of work: set up a file, do an initial formal examination, perform a novelty search, and quite often engage in correspondence with the applicant to sort out various issues. It seems reasonable to assume that initial applications "as such" do not cover their own costs for the patent office.
But once a patent has been granted, nice things start to happen to the patent office's profitability calculations.
At the moment the patent is granted, the proprietor has to pay $1400 in "issuance fee". Then, in order to keep his patent valid, he has to pay maintenance fees at regular intervals. $900 is due at 3.5 years after it was granted, $2,300 due at 7.5 years, and $3,800 due at 11.5 years.
For a patent that is renewed throughout its full term, the post-allowance and maintenance fees add up to $8,400, compared to the $1000 for the initial application.
And the renewal fees are the good part of the patent office business, since the PTO doesn't actually have to do anything for the money, except make a note in the file that the fee has been paid. So for those patent offices around the world that are funded in whole or in part by the fees they collect, there is a direct incentive to let the standards slip to the lowest level they can possibly get away with.
The result can be seen at a patent office near you.
(This post is essentially a repost of a reply I made in another patent discussion a couple of days ago, with some minor changes in the numbers, as I had missed some of the fees in the original post. But the logic remains exactly the same.)
You can find links to a dozen or so studies that come to the conclusion that software patents are in fact harmful to innovation and the economy as a whole here.
It is not primarily because the patent examiners are incompetent, as is often suggested. Instead it is the economics of running a patent office that make sure that it becomes like this.
Nowadays most patent offices around the world are "self funded", which means that they are funded by the fees that the collect from the patent applicants. This may perhaps seem like a sensible idea at first sight, but unfortunately it invariably leads to lower and lower standards for what is patentable.
A look at the USPTO Fee Schedule explains the underlying math.
The initial application fee for a patent is $300. In order to collect that money, the patent office has to do quite a lot of work: set up a file, do an initial formal examination, perform a novelty search, and quite often engage in correspondence with the applicant to sort out various issues. It seems reasonable to assume that initial applications "as such" do not cover their own costs for the patent office.
But once a patent has been granted, nice things start to happen to the patent office's profitability calculations.
In order to keep his patent valid, the proprietor has to pay maintenance fees at regular intervals. $900 is due at 3.5 years after it was granted, $2,300 due at 7.5 years, and $3,800 due at 11.5 years.
For a patent that is renewed throughout its full term, the maintenance fees add up to $7,000, compared to the $300 for the initial application.
And the renewal fees are the good part of the patent office business, since the PTO doesn't actually have to do anything for the money, except make a note in the file that the fee has been paid. So for those patent offices around the world that are funded in whole or in part by the fees they collect, there is a direct incentive to let the standards slip to the lowest level they can possibly get away with.
The result can be seen at a patent office near you.
This decision is quite funny. A couple of months ago, Slashdot was running a story about a piece by Richard Stallman where he made the analogy with the works of Victor Hugo being covered by patents on literary plots. Then there were some posters who thought Dr. Stallman was making an absurd comparison, and that patents on literature would never happen.
Well, well...
Meanwhile, in Europe, we have chosen another road. After the victory on July 6, when the European Parliament rejected the software directive, we now have a chance to get one of our activists to win the title "European of the Year" in an open Internet poll organized by a big business magazine.
Please feel free to go to NoSoftwarePatents.com for instructions on how to vote, while you contemplate this latest madness by the US patent establishment.
You can start by having a look at these ones, for example:
"Stronger IP protection is not always better. Chances are that patents on software, common practice in the US and on the brink of being legalised in Europe, in fact stifle innovation. Europe could still alter course"
PriceWaterhouseCoopers:
"The mild regime of IP protection in the past has led to a very innovative and competitive software industry with low entry barriers. A software patent, which serves to protect inventions of a non-technical nature, could kill the high innovation rate."
Federal Trade Commission:
"More patents in more industries and with greater breadth are not always the best ways to maximize consumer welfare."
"Many panelists and participants expressed the view that software and Internet patents are impeding innovation. They stated that such patents are impairing follow-on incentives, increasing entry barriers, creating uncertainty that harms incentives to invest in innovation, and producing patent thickets. Panelists discussed how defensive patenting increases the complexity of patent thickets and forces companies to divert resources from R&D into obtaining patents. Commentators noted that patent thickets make it more difficult to commercialize new products and raise uncertainty and investment risks. Some panelists also noted that hold-up has become a problem that can result in higher prices being passed along to consumers."
The FFII has a list of further studies that you can have a look at here.
Now, perhaps I can turn the questions around. Can anybody provide a link to a single reputable study that concludes that software patents are necessary or good for society?
If so, please do.
But to the best of my knowledge there isn't any such study, so please don't feel embarassed if you can't. :-)
Last Monday, the FFII and NoSoftwarePatents.com jointly won the CNET award for Outstanding Contribution to Software Development in Europe.
This award for the anti software patents movement is both very welcome and very well deserved. When the European Parliament rejected software patents on July 6, it was a great victory. Not only for the open source movement, but for all European businesses that use or produce software. It is nice to see this recognized in this manner.
One To Win
We also have a chance of winning another award in recognition of all activists who have spent countless hours on making the swpat victory happen.
The founder of NoSoftwarePatents.com Florian Müller has been nominated as a candidate for the title "European of the Year" in an open Internet poll organized by The European Voice, a weekly magazine that focuses on EU politics.
If he wins either the big "European of the Year" award, or the category "Campaigner of the Year" where he is also nominated, it would be a nice PR victory for the anti-swpat movement.
Also nominated in the "MEP of the Year" category is Michel Rochard, the former French Prime Minister who championed our cause as rapporteur in the European Parliament, where we won on July 6.
If you want to donate a few mouseclicks to the fight against software patents, you can go to and register your vote. Only one vote per person.
Note that you have to vote in all the categories, or your vote will be disqualified. For the most part it doesn't matter who you choose in the other categories, but there are a few bad apples (from an anti-swpat perspective), so here are some suggestions. But it's Campaigner, MEP, and European of the Year that are the important ones.
1) Commissioner of the Year:
Don't vote for Charlie McGreevy, who is the commissioner who tried to ram software patents down Europe's throat.
2) MEP of the Year:
Vote for Michel Rochard, who won for us in Parliament.
3) Statesman of the Year:
Avoid Blair, Schröder, and Juncker because of how their respective governments behaved over the directive (especially Juncker, Luxembourg). This leaves the candidates from Italy, Poland or Spain to choose from.
4) Diplomat of the Year:
Don't vote for Nicolas Schmitt, who is part of the Luxembourg government that handled the swpat issue so disgracefully and anti-democratically during the Luxembourg EU Presidency.
5) Campaigner of the Year:
Vote for Florian Müller, NoSoftwarePatents.com
6) Business Leader of the Year:
Pick one.
7) Journalist of the Year:
Pick one.
8) Achiever of the Year:
Pick one.
9) Non-EU Citizen of the Year:
Pick one.
10) European of the Year:
Vote for Florian Müller, NoSoftwarePatents.com
Although one could argue that Michel Rochard would be just as worthy from our perspective, I think it sends a stronger and clearer message if one of our activists wins the award, rather than a politician that is involved in many other issues as well. As it would be very damaging to our chances of winning the most prestigious of the awards if the anti-swpat vote is split on two candidates, my recommendation is Florian Müller only.
For more information about the nominees, see the presentations at the award site here. The poll closes on November 11, and the award will be handed out at a gala dinner hosted by former EU Parliament president Pat Cox later that month.
The domain ffii.org is currently offline, due to a hoster who did not have the nerve to research a baseless threat letter sent by Nutzwerk's lawyers.
The FFII.org machine is not offline.
For instance you can still view
And if you give 212.72.72.97 as a nameserver, you can see all ffii.org domains.But I agree with you that it would be naive and foolish to think that the proponents of software patents have all given up and gone home now.
They just lost a really major battle in Europe, yes. But they haven't run out of lobbying money yet, so I too would expect them to try again in some other way.
But I agree with you, the list of examples where heavy-handed tactics from the authorities have failed to produce the promised results, or indeed been contra-productive, is much much longer.
And of course they didn't stop Baader-Meinhof by carpet bombing the major German cities.
I wish more people would read Henry Kissinger's fantastic book "Diplomacy" before they start suggesting drastic anti-terrorist measures. He, if anybody, knows first hand the limitations of that kind of strategy, and he explains them in a lucid and intellectually dispassionate way that it is a joy to read.
And I haven't heard anybody call Dr. Kissinger a soft liberal leftie yet. ;-)
But can you explain why the phrase "as such" (which doesn't really have very much meaning at all in normal English) should be interpreted in so fundamentally different ways when it's applied to computer programs as opposed to other things that are listed in Article 52.2, like films, books, or other aesthetic creations?
The text "Why can't I patent my movie?" expands on this question. So far, I haven't recieved one single sensible answer from any patent proponent or apologist.
Can you provide one?
Like, when the operating system was like actually
- stable
- documented
- consistent, so that you could actually memorize commands and their options
Those were the days.I apologize for being an old fart, but having spent the last five years with Windows as my primary OS (after having been on VMS since 1985), I'm still emphatically unimpressed with what goes for "modern technology".
Of course there are things you can do on Windows or Unix that simply weren't available on VMS. But when it comes to reliability and sheer good design, I still very much miss VMS.
Like I said, I apologize. :-)
The patent lobby tried to sneak in software patents through the back door, by claiming that it was only about harmonization, that the directive wouldn't change anything, etc, etc. They failed.
The issue has led to the most intensive lobbying campaign ever in Brussels (from both sides). Whatever their position on the issue "as such" may be, there is not a single member of the European Parliament who now thinks that this is "just a small technical matter that can safely be left to the patent experts to decide on".
If the patent lobby wants to continue working for the legalization of patents on software and business methods (and they will), they will have to engage in a serious debate about the benefit/harm of such patents. And since they don't really have any arguments that can stand scrutiny in daylight, they will have a very difficult time.
Sure, the FFII would have preferred a directive that reaffirmed the ban on software patents in Article 52 of the European Patent Convention, and led to greater harmonization in Europe. Alas, that didn't happen, because the patent lobby got cold feet and preferred to kill the directive rather than risk a vote in Parliament that they would probably have lost.
But at least we didn't get a bad directive that wiped out Article 52 and forced national parliaments to introduce software patents against their will. The situation now is that software patents are illegal in Europe (as they always have been according to the EPC), but that we still have a European Patent Office that needs to be reined in so that it starts to follow the law.
But the law remains unchanged, and computer programs and methods of doing business are not considered patentable inventions.
Today was a great day in the battle for a free and open information infrastructure, and for a favorable business environment in Europe for enterprises that use or produce software.
If you study the USPTO Fee Schedule, you'll see how it works.
$900 due at 3.5 years after it was granted, $2,300 due at 7.5 years, and $3,800 due at 11.5 years. Compared to the $300 for the initial application, if I read the fee list correctly.
And the renewal fees are the good part of the patent office business, since the PTO doesn't actually have to do anything for the money, except make a note in the file that the fee has been paid. So for those patent offices around the world that are funded in whole or in part by the fees they collect, there is a direct incentive to let the standards slip to the lowest level they can possibly get away with.
Here is a link to a firm of US patent lawyers that are trying to expand patentability into plot elements in novels as well: http://www.plotpatents.com/
And after all, why shouldn't they? If they succeed, it means increased revenues for patent lawyers. If literature, freedom of expression, or society at large happen to lose as a consequence, do you think they care?