The EPO is stating that: A computer program can be patented as such, if it has a "further technical effect". But practically any solution to a computing problem constitutes a "further technical effect".
The EPO further declares that the "arrangement or manner of representation", may as well constitute a patentable technical feature. And examples which are given include pulse code modulation or a measuring instrument which produces a particular form of graph for representing the measured information and a computer data structure. This means that according to the EPO's guidelines, the order of information in a data structure could be patented if accessing the data structure is claimed. Yes!! I claim Name and Address (and Address and Name, to be on the safe side)!
As the FFI points out:
The most frequently used rhetorical trick of the Council paper works as follows: [A] is not patentable, unless [condition B] is met. But, upon close scrutiny, it turns out that condition B is always met.
It gets worse.
The wording "normal physical interaction between a program and the computer" means about as much as "normal physical interaction between a recipe and the cook", that is: nothing. It is a magic formula whose usage can be inferred only from recent decisions of the EPO, in which it served to justify the granting of patents on geometrical calculation rules to IBM. In the present case, according to the EPO, the "further technical effect beyond..." consisted in the economisation of space on a computer screen. Wow! Novel or what?
"...an Australian government study of the patent system in the 1980's concluded that aside from international pressure, there was no reason to have a patent system. It did no good for the public and recommended abolishing it if not for international pressure."
"I am thinking here of the extension of the concept of property to such rights and privileges as patents for inventions, copyright, trade-marks, and the like. It seems to me beyond doubt that in these fields a slavish application of the concept of property as it has been developed for material things has done a great deal to foster the growth of monopoly and that here drastic reforms may be required if competition is to be made to work. In the field of industrial patents in particular we shall have seriously to examine whether the award of a monopoly privilege is really the most appropriate and effective form of reward for the kind of risk-bearing which investment in scientific research involves."
The 'technical effect' is a weasel phrase that allows any form of software patent. The FFII has shown how ridiculous this is by assuming a 'book implemented invention':
"Imagine a book, so the technical effect of a book would occur when your hands get lame from changing the pages or the eye movement tires you. Therefore we had proven that a reduction of letters causes a technical effect. Book-implemented inventions that contribute to more efficient use of letter space thus involve a technical effect and can get patented. The mere handling and displaying of information as such however cannot get patented."
And there's plenty more to show what nonsense a 'technical effect' is. I've seen it argued that 'technical effect' will have the same effect as 'reasonable doubt' and that arguments on both sides will be heard. Oh, come on, get real. Who's got the money and the motivation to argue slowly and surely, building case law on their side such that 'technical effect' can mean whatever they like. Yep, those generous and humanitarian souls at the corporate legal department.
And as for those who argue that the software for a device driver should be subject to patent, I ask why? If the hardware doesn't change, but a new release of s/w occurs what's patently new? Nothing, switches are flipped, memory is updated elsewhere or whatever, which is how the hardware was designed to function. Why isn't the hardware capable of being subject to a good patent on its own? If it is, then the s/w does not need to be patented. It's like a car and the (human) driver. Patenting the driver is like patenting software. I bet even the USPTO might think twice about patenting a NY taxi cab driver...
This so-called 'A-item' should not have been put before the committe in the first place as it disregards the rules for placing these items. The (unelected, govt. appointed) EU Commission (as usual) is simply making up its own rules as it goes along.
With this sort of arrogant crap we constantly suffer from the Commission, is it any wonder that even if this item is thrown out, we still might not win. The European Patent Office can still do its own thing. Don't believe me? The EPO is not bound by many of the laws or regulations that most of the citizens of Europe take for granted, such as the European Convention on Human Rights.
Some examples:
. The Employment Law offers the staff extremely limited protection. Staff can be dismissed almost at will by the President and have no claims to unemployment pay or other social security payments
. Basic legal rights are ignored. The President is the ultimate ruler of the EPO. He is judge, jury and executioner. His decisions on matters within the office are final. Any decision made by the President can be enacted immediately. There is no "stay of execution" pending the outcome of appeal hearings. Sanctions are arbitrary and harsh.
. Even criminal law is disregarded: In 1995 the then President of the EPO physically attacked and injured a staff member, the Administrative Council of the EPO subsequently refusing to lift the immunity of the President.
...novel...
And here's the key word. Patents are supposed to describe something new and 'non-obvious'. But 99.9999(9)% of patents on software are utterly trivial and even any half-witted developer routinely produces simple algorithms that are blindingly obvious:
x = 2;
y = 'z';
print 'Eh? if x is not z;
is the sort of thing that springs to mind. But ISNOT is being patented.
Hardly novel or non-obvious. It doesn't contribute to the sum of human wealth and economy in any arguably sensible way that I can see.
On the 13th Jan, I received the following (extract) from the UK Labour Party group of MEPs:
"The Labour MEPs' position is reflected in the amendments we tabled and voted for in the Parliament's report on the Commission proposal on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions. In short, the position remains:
. No US-style patenting of software.
. Software as such, must not be patented. No patenting of business methods or "general ideas"
. Opensource software must be allowed to flourish and the Commission must ensure that this Directive does not have any adverse effect on opensource software and small software developers.
. Patents and the threat of litigation must not be used as an anti-competitive weapon to squeeze out small companies."
I'm not sure what they intend to do about this latest news. Email/snailmail all takes so-o-o-o long and I wonder whether it's just assistants sending stock replies...
I agree. But the Harvard chappie is also ascribing an importance to something because if his (seeming) male bias.
Suppose I was to take a reasonably homogeous population, that of the New England states, for example. I could quite easily show that, in general men are taller than women. Nobody would be surprised or impressed with that conclusion. If I now state that it makes men better than women in the high-jump, you might reply: "So what?. Women are better at limbo dancing because they can more easily get under the low bar." The Harvard reply would be, however: "Ah but, you see, high jump is more important than limbo dancing."
It's a horribly overused word. I've seen it used when one company we were considering working with had a library that they claimed would speed up the development process because it provided 'synergy' with what we were doing. Superficially, perhaps. But looking at the detail, it became obvious it would just get in the way.
And that's the problem. The word is used when people don't have the details. And how can a sales blurb know, for certain, that whatever they are selling will provide 'synergy'. It's a stupid thing to claim.
I worked for one company supplying travel services on a big scale. A sales 'executive' sold the idea to Wal*Mart without any reference to the tekkies. His idea (initially) would have meant installing a 45Mb pipe across the Atlantic and any profit on actual bookings would have been more than eaten up by simple queries. We gave him the hard facts and I can still hear him wailing: "But I've already sold the system!"
I can see the point behind marketing (my sister-in-law is a marketing powerhouse) and obviously none of us would survive without sales, but there is so much bullshit associated with sales and marketing, so much nonsense made up without reference to the technical details that anybody with even the smallest amount of technical understanding is rightly dismissive of most of what come out of S & M depts., IMHO.
I've come across situations where it's even worse than that - in the opposite direction. A large bank's technical department (usually quite rightly) drove the technical requirements of the department looking at our product.
But the technical department was completely confused between J2EE and EJBs. This confusion was communicated to the buying department and they then kept accusing us of not understanding J2EE. Our product was being written to J2EE 'standards' but we were not using EJBs.
Eventually, it dawned on me that both depts. thought J2EE meant EJBs. I then had to spend a lot of effort explaining why they did not need EJBs for this product. It didn't get through to the department looking at our product (it was probably too late by then anyway) and we lost the work (after many months...).
Gates originally said (amongst other things):
"... I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist."
In the part 4 above, he says:
"All I was saying is that the number of people who are at this extreme who believe there should be no incentive systems for creative work--there's actually less of those people."
By 'belief in incentive systems', he actually means (or perhaps even sincerely believes) that there exists no incentive for writing software for public/GPL/Copyleft (or whatever) usage. With his 'logic', you have to be paid (and, in some cases, well paid) to want to write software. Perhaps he's a closet Creationist too?
The first lot of data is so-called 'dummy super-data' I understand as Cassini started recording early. Don't expect to see much in the way of image data, BTW, until about 20:30CET about 3 hours from this post.
The whole collaboration screwed up:
"The [investigation] board discovered that Alenia Spazio SpA, the Rome-based company that built the radio link, had properly anticipated the need to make the receiver sensitive over a wide enough range of frequencies to detect Huygens's carrier signal even when Doppler shifted." So far, so good.
Furthermore:
"Alenia Spazio wasn't alone in missing the impact Doppler shift would have on the decoder. All the design reviews of the communications link, including those conducted with NASA participation, also failed to notice the error..."
The problem they all missed was:
"... another subtle consequence: Doppler shift would affect not just the frequency of the carrier wave that the probe's vital observations would be transmitted on but also the digitally encoded signal itself. In effect, the shift would push the signal out of synch with the timing scheme used to recover data from the phase-modulated carrier."
In fact:
"In proposing this more complex test with simulated telemetry, Smeds (the Swedish engineer) 'had to argue with those who didn't think it was necessary,' recalled JPL's Mitchell. Smeds was persistent and continued championing the test even after it was initially rejected. In the end, with the backing of Sollazzo and Huygens's project scientist (at ESA), Jean-Pierre Lebreton, Smeds's plan was accepted because it was easy to do, even though hardly anybody seemed to think it was worth doing."
Nobody's perfect, even NASA/JPL couldn't make their minds up how to measure stuff which caused the Mars Orbiter burn up...
The US engineers did not discover the problem. It was a Swedish engineer.
Furthermore: "Alenia Spazio (the Italian contractor) wasn't alone in missing the impact Doppler shift would have on the decoder. All the design reviews of the communications link, including those conducted with NASA participation, also failed to notice the error that would threaten to turn Huygens's moment of glory into an embarrassing failure."
Get your facts right (although being AC, no doubt it was just xenophobic bullshit on your part).
Slashdot Mirror
The EPO is stating that: A computer program can be patented as such, if it has a "further technical effect". But practically any solution to a computing problem constitutes a "further technical effect".
..." consisted in the economisation of space on a computer screen. Wow! Novel or what?
The EPO further declares that the "arrangement or manner of representation", may as well constitute a patentable technical feature. And examples which are given include pulse code modulation or a measuring instrument which produces a particular form of graph for representing the measured information and a computer data structure. This means that according to the EPO's guidelines, the order of information in a data structure could be patented if accessing the data structure is claimed. Yes!! I claim Name and Address (and Address and Name, to be on the safe side)!
As the FFI points out:
The most frequently used rhetorical trick of the Council paper works as follows: [A] is not patentable, unless [condition B] is met. But, upon close scrutiny, it turns out that condition B is always met.
It gets worse.
The wording "normal physical interaction between a program and the computer" means about as much as "normal physical interaction between a recipe and the cook", that is: nothing. It is a magic formula whose usage can be inferred only from recent decisions of the EPO, in which it served to justify the granting of patents on geometrical calculation rules to IBM. In the present case, according to the EPO, the "further technical effect beyond
Richard Stallman said:
"...an Australian government study of the patent system in the 1980's concluded that aside from international pressure, there was no reason to have a patent system. It did no good for the public and recommended abolishing it if not for international pressure."
Maggie Thatcher's favourite economist, Hayek, said:
"I am thinking here of the extension of the concept of property to such rights and privileges as patents for inventions, copyright, trade-marks, and the like. It seems to me beyond doubt that in these fields a slavish application of the concept of property as it has been developed for material things has done a great deal to foster the growth of monopoly and that here drastic reforms may be required if competition is to be made to work. In the field of industrial patents in particular we shall have seriously to examine whether the award of a monopoly privilege is really the most appropriate and effective form of reward for the kind of risk-bearing which investment in scientific research involves."
The 'technical effect' is a weasel phrase that allows any form of software patent. The FFII has shown how ridiculous this is by assuming a 'book implemented invention':
"Imagine a book, so the technical effect of a book would occur when your hands get lame from changing the pages or the eye movement tires you. Therefore we had proven that a reduction of letters causes a technical effect. Book-implemented inventions that contribute to more efficient use of letter space thus involve a technical effect and can get patented. The mere handling and displaying of information as such however cannot get patented."
And there's plenty more to show what nonsense a 'technical effect' is. I've seen it argued that 'technical effect' will have the same effect as 'reasonable doubt' and that arguments on both sides will be heard. Oh, come on, get real. Who's got the money and the motivation to argue slowly and surely, building case law on their side such that 'technical effect' can mean whatever they like. Yep, those generous and humanitarian souls at the corporate legal department.
And as for those who argue that the software for a device driver should be subject to patent, I ask why? If the hardware doesn't change, but a new release of s/w occurs what's patently new? Nothing, switches are flipped, memory is updated elsewhere or whatever, which is how the hardware was designed to function. Why isn't the hardware capable of being subject to a good patent on its own? If it is, then the s/w does not need to be patented. It's like a car and the (human) driver. Patenting the driver is like patenting software. I bet even the USPTO might think twice about patenting a NY taxi cab driver...
This so-called 'A-item' should not have been put before the committe in the first place as it disregards the rules for placing these items. The (unelected, govt. appointed) EU Commission (as usual) is simply making up its own rules as it goes along.
With this sort of arrogant crap we constantly suffer from the Commission, is it any wonder that even if this item is thrown out, we still might not win. The European Patent Office can still do its own thing. Don't believe me? The EPO is not bound by many of the laws or regulations that most of the citizens of Europe take for granted, such as the European Convention on Human Rights.
Some examples:
. The Employment Law offers the staff extremely limited protection. Staff can be dismissed almost at will by the President and have no claims to unemployment pay or other social security payments
. Basic legal rights are ignored. The President is the ultimate ruler of the EPO. He is judge, jury and executioner. His decisions on matters within the office are final. Any decision made by the President can be enacted immediately. There is no "stay of execution" pending the outcome of appeal hearings. Sanctions are arbitrary and harsh.
. Even criminal law is disregarded: In 1995 the then President of the EPO physically attacked and injured a staff member, the Administrative Council of the EPO subsequently refusing to lift the immunity of the President.
Nope. That's a succinct enough explanation..
...novel...
And here's the key word. Patents are supposed to describe something new and 'non-obvious'. But 99.9999(9)% of patents on software are utterly trivial and even any half-witted developer routinely produces simple algorithms that are blindingly obvious:
x = 2;
y = 'z';
print 'Eh? if x is not z;
is the sort of thing that springs to mind. But ISNOT is being patented.
Hardly novel or non-obvious. It doesn't contribute to the sum of human wealth and economy in any arguably sensible way that I can see.
On the 13th Jan, I received the following (extract) from the UK Labour Party group of MEPs:
"The Labour MEPs' position is reflected in the amendments we tabled and voted for in the Parliament's report on the Commission proposal on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions. In short, the position remains:
. No US-style patenting of software.
. Software as such, must not be patented. No patenting of business methods or "general ideas"
. Opensource software must be allowed to flourish and the Commission must ensure that this Directive does not have any adverse effect on opensource software and small software developers.
. Patents and the threat of litigation must not be used as an anti-competitive weapon to squeeze out small companies."
I'm not sure what they intend to do about this latest news. Email/snailmail all takes so-o-o-o long and I wonder whether it's just assistants sending stock replies...
just my 2 (canadian) c.
...worth a lot more than US cents these days...
I agree. But the Harvard chappie is also ascribing an importance to something because if his (seeming) male bias.
Suppose I was to take a reasonably homogeous population, that of the New England states, for example. I could quite easily show that, in general men are taller than women. Nobody would be surprised or impressed with that conclusion. If I now state that it makes men better than women in the high-jump, you might reply: "So what?. Women are better at limbo dancing because they can more easily get under the low bar." The Harvard reply would be, however: "Ah but, you see, high jump is more important than limbo dancing."
It's a horribly overused word. I've seen it used when one company we were considering working with had a library that they claimed would speed up the development process because it provided 'synergy' with what we were doing. Superficially, perhaps. But looking at the detail, it became obvious it would just get in the way.
And that's the problem. The word is used when people don't have the details. And how can a sales blurb know, for certain, that whatever they are selling will provide 'synergy'. It's a stupid thing to claim.
I worked for one company supplying travel services on a big scale. A sales 'executive' sold the idea to Wal*Mart without any reference to the tekkies. His idea (initially) would have meant installing a 45Mb pipe across the Atlantic and any profit on actual bookings would have been more than eaten up by simple queries. We gave him the hard facts and I can still hear him wailing: "But I've already sold the system!"
I can see the point behind marketing (my sister-in-law is a marketing powerhouse) and obviously none of us would survive without sales, but there is so much bullshit associated with sales and marketing, so much nonsense made up without reference to the technical details that anybody with even the smallest amount of technical understanding is rightly dismissive of most of what come out of S & M depts., IMHO.
I've come across situations where it's even worse than that - in the opposite direction. A large bank's technical department (usually quite rightly) drove the technical requirements of the department looking at our product.
But the technical department was completely confused between J2EE and EJBs. This confusion was communicated to the buying department and they then kept accusing us of not understanding J2EE. Our product was being written to J2EE 'standards' but we were not using EJBs.
Eventually, it dawned on me that both depts. thought J2EE meant EJBs. I then had to spend a lot of effort explaining why they did not need EJBs for this product. It didn't get through to the department looking at our product (it was probably too late by then anyway) and we lost the work (after many months...).
...just take a cold bath!
Actually, it's a 66/67 minute delay. The distance from Saturn to Earth is 746 million miles
No: Huygens.
All concerned missed it:
"All the design reviews of the communications link, including those conducted with NASA participation, also failed to notice the error"
Gates originally said (amongst other things):
"... I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were. There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist."
In the part 4 above, he says:
"All I was saying is that the number of people who are at this extreme who believe there should be no incentive systems for creative work--there's actually less of those people."
By 'belief in incentive systems', he actually means (or perhaps even sincerely believes) that there exists no incentive for writing software for public/GPL/Copyleft (or whatever) usage. With his 'logic', you have to be paid (and, in some cases, well paid) to want to write software. Perhaps he's a closet Creationist too?
The first lot of data is so-called 'dummy super-data' I understand as Cassini started recording early. Don't expect to see much in the way of image data, BTW, until about 20:30CET about 3 hours from this post.
...this guy said: "While NASA's Cassini works flawlessly, the ESA's Huygens probe will deliver superior science just like Beagle. It, too, will fail."
You know who you are...
Profits are easy to manipulate. The stock price is only marginally above where it was 5 years ago according to Yahoo.
...isn't a hash table just something to stop your hash dropping on the floor? I know the USPTO has made some weird decisions, but still...
The whole collaboration screwed up:
"The [investigation] board discovered that Alenia Spazio SpA, the Rome-based company that built the radio link, had properly anticipated the need to make the receiver sensitive over a wide enough range of frequencies to detect Huygens's carrier signal even when Doppler shifted."
So far, so good.
Furthermore:
"Alenia Spazio wasn't alone in missing the impact Doppler shift would have on the decoder. All the design reviews of the communications link, including those conducted with NASA participation, also failed to notice the error..."
The problem they all missed was:
"... another subtle consequence: Doppler shift would affect not just the frequency of the carrier wave that the probe's vital observations would be transmitted on but also the digitally encoded signal itself. In effect, the shift would push the signal out of synch with the timing scheme used to recover data from the phase-modulated carrier."
In fact:
"In proposing this more complex test with simulated telemetry, Smeds (the Swedish engineer) 'had to argue with those who didn't think it was necessary,' recalled JPL's Mitchell. Smeds was persistent and continued championing the test even after it was initially rejected. In the end, with the backing of Sollazzo and Huygens's project scientist (at ESA), Jean-Pierre Lebreton, Smeds's plan was accepted because it was easy to do, even though hardly anybody seemed to think it was worth doing."
Nobody's perfect, even NASA/JPL couldn't make their minds up how to measure stuff which caused the Mars Orbiter burn up...
So you have faith in NASA because of the Mars Orbiter FU?
See previous post. They all F'd Up.
The US engineers did not discover the problem. It was a Swedish engineer.
Furthermore: "Alenia Spazio (the Italian contractor) wasn't alone in missing the impact Doppler shift would have on the decoder. All the design reviews of the communications link, including those conducted with NASA participation, also failed to notice the error that would threaten to turn Huygens's moment of glory into an embarrassing failure."
Get your facts right (although being AC, no doubt it was just xenophobic bullshit on your part).