Their goal is to conclude the ACTA agreement by the end of 2010. Countries involved are Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Jordan, Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States (US) - and others will be pressured to join afterward.
Microsoft is asking people to pay them for patents, but they won't say which ones. If a guy walks into a shop and says: "It's an unsafe neighbourhood, why don't you pay me 20 bucks and I'll make sure you're okay," that's illegal. It's racketeering.
To fix the patent situation, we need that kind of vocal support of executives. Will we get that support from Matt?
Free software makes for great headlines ("Miguel de Icaza is basically a traitor to the Free Software community"), but it is far too demanding, and of largely the wrong things, to capture mainstream interest.... The path forward is open source, not free software. Sometimes that openness will mean embracing Microsoft in order to meet a customer's needs....Free software has lost.
Dude, that's you being at odds with the goals of the freedom-first advocates. You can embrace Microsoft all you like. Meanwhile, I'm busy working to minimise the patent and FUD harm they're doing to us. Canonical have been helpful so far in campaigns against software patents. I hope there won't be a new "don't offend Microsoft" vibe that changes this.
Just because the tag exists, doesn't mean you can slap it everywhere you see an edit that doesn't support your world view! You deletionists are ruining Wikipedia for the rest of us. Assume Good Faith!
For the Kiwis, there's also the proposed software patents bill in New Zealand. It's set to be discussed again in, IIRC, March (the page that had the status is 404ing now - I should have mirrored it up). I'll go search for a new source to confirm the status and timeline and will update the wiki.
This sort of campaign can never fully solve the swpat problem, but patents on media formats are probably the biggest pain, so this is very worthwhile. The H.264 Mpeg format that Google currently uses is covered by over 900 patents in 29 countries!
Easy. You write something that you think it too long and complicated for a patent examiner to fully undertand in the 17 hours he/she will be allocated. Then it gets granted and for twenty years you can threaten anyone that developers or distributes software that does anything resembling your patent. (You, the writer of a patent, are a protected innovator. Those guys writing software are nasty pirates - watch out!)
When someone receives your threat letter, they become formally aware of your patent and they now risk triple damages plus paying your lawyers' fees! Win! To avoid this, they could ask their own lawyer for a certificate of non-violation, which costs $40,000. So, if the original letter (which cost 39c to send) asks for $35,000, there's a good chance you'll simply get your money. (As explained by patent attorney Dan Ravicher in this presentation)
Or, you could contest the patent and kill your company by spending 5 years paying legal fees and having a cloud of uncertainty around your business making you untouchable for investors. (As is the case with the 1-click patent)
But, don't worry, patent law does contain a consideration for the public: the nightmare ends after 20 years, so that's why we're all really excited now about Photoshop 1.0 finally becoming patent-free. I hear there's a great operating system that will be patent-free in 2015!
...but I still maintain that the real harm of software patents is that they block access to standards. Compatibility is essential for writing functional software, so some people having a legal veto on others being compatible is a big social problem.
swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki, help welcome.
Bandwidth wasn't the problem. They need funding to keep going, so, to show how essential they are, they took everything off line and said they'll keep it off line until they receive enough donations to keep going. They hoped to be back on line by January 18th, but they're still off line.
I think it's a tactical blunder. They even broke all their links - instead of being redirected to a "we need donations", you just get a 404! Messers.
Make a backup. We don't want another case like Wikileaks, where a leaked draft goes online and then the site comes down for planning and doesn't come back up.
Whatever's in there about patents, please make notes here:
Getting patents out of ACTA is probably a very achievable goal. When we were working on an EU directive to criminalise violations of "IP", we raised a stink about the idea of becoming a criminal for violating any one of the 50,000 software patents which nobody could be expected to read.
That directive, like ACTA, was being pushed by the copyright industry. The second we make them nervous about the whole thing crumbling over patents, patents will disappear over night.
That's what's achievable, but only if we work on it. One very easy way to help is to document what's happening in ACTA regarding patents, and why software patents are terrible:
Can someone who knows these products tell me if these laptops will work well with free software, or are they are disaster like the Intel GMA500(right?) based laptops?
Having spent a few years as a lobbyist in the European Parliament during the EU software patents directive, I can tell you that it's very easy to affect the MEPs.
I learned that they're mostly lost, and the centre-left guy will vote your way just as quickly as the centre-right guy will, so which one you voted for doesn't make a huge difference, but talking to them does. (FWIW, the best party in there is clearly the Greens.) Tell them your concerns and show them your evidence. Showing evidence is essential so they can justify their vote.
A leaked copy was posted on wikileaks, but they took everything offline due to their financial problems. Does anyone have a copy of the leaked document? Please post it here, or add it to this public wiki:
Why does this matter so much? Once one (now two) countries reject OOXML, it means it cannot become *the* international/European document standard for the public sector.
Everyone's going to make this smart ass joke, but there's actually a serious question here.
The USPTO grants patents for utter nonsense. Then, to maintain credibility, they have to abide by the law saying that all those nonsense things are illegal for 20 years.
If someone during a board meeting pointed out that rotating electronically received data communications was patented, the board would be required to decide to stop doing that (or license the patent, but maybe they can't, or maybe the patent holder said no).
Slashdot Mirror
Worse, it's in the ACTA treaty:
Their goal is to conclude the ACTA agreement by the end of 2010. Countries involved are Australia, Canada, the European Union, Japan, Jordan, Korea, Mexico, Morocco, New Zealand, Singapore, Switzerland, the United Arab Emirates, and the United States (US) - and others will be pressured to join afterward.
Microsoft is FUDing, and Mark Shuttleworth called them on it:
Microsoft is asking people to pay them for patents, but they won't say which ones. If a guy walks into a shop and says: "It's an unsafe neighbourhood, why don't you pay me 20 bucks and I'll make sure you're okay," that's illegal. It's racketeering.
To fix the patent situation, we need that kind of vocal support of executives. Will we get that support from Matt?
From this interview: I've never considered myself at odds with the goals of freedom-first software advocates
And just last September he wrote that "Free software is dead. Long live open source", where he writes:
Free software makes for great headlines ("Miguel de Icaza is basically a traitor to the Free Software community"), but it is far too demanding, and of largely the wrong things, to capture mainstream interest. ... The path forward is open source, not free software. Sometimes that openness will mean embracing Microsoft in order to meet a customer's needs. ...Free software has lost.
Dude, that's you being at odds with the goals of the freedom-first advocates. You can embrace Microsoft all you like. Meanwhile, I'm busy working to minimise the patent and FUD harm they're doing to us. Canonical have been helpful so far in campaigns against software patents. I hope there won't be a new "don't offend Microsoft" vibe that changes this.
First there's a patent that prevents the USPTO from rotating applications 180, and now they can't even turn their screen to read stuff?
Life in the thing-rotation space is getting pretty tight.
Here's the software patent info I've gathered on these topics so far:
swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki, help welcome.
http://en.swpat.org/wiki/ACTA-6437-10.pdf_as_text
Just because the tag exists, doesn't mean you can slap it everywhere you see an edit that doesn't support your world view! You deletionists are ruining Wikipedia for the rest of us. Assume Good Faith!
For the Kiwis, there's also the proposed software patents bill in New Zealand. It's set to be discussed again in, IIRC, March (the page that had the status is 404ing now - I should have mirrored it up). I'll go search for a new source to confirm the status and timeline and will update the wiki.
Here's some background info on these deals:
I don't time right now to look into this deal, so if someone could add info to en.swpat.org about it, that would be great. Otherwise I'll do it later.
This sort of campaign can never fully solve the swpat problem, but patents on media formats are probably the biggest pain, so this is very worthwhile. The H.264 Mpeg format that Google currently uses is covered by over 900 patents in 29 countries!
Here's info I've gathered about these topics:
swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki, help welcome.
how do patents work in america?
Easy. You write something that you think it too long and complicated for a patent examiner to fully undertand in the 17 hours he/she will be allocated. Then it gets granted and for twenty years you can threaten anyone that developers or distributes software that does anything resembling your patent. (You, the writer of a patent, are a protected innovator. Those guys writing software are nasty pirates - watch out!)
When someone receives your threat letter, they become formally aware of your patent and they now risk triple damages plus paying your lawyers' fees! Win! To avoid this, they could ask their own lawyer for a certificate of non-violation, which costs $40,000. So, if the original letter (which cost 39c to send) asks for $35,000, there's a good chance you'll simply get your money. (As explained by patent attorney Dan Ravicher in this presentation)
Or, you could contest the patent and kill your company by spending 5 years paying legal fees and having a cloud of uncertainty around your business making you untouchable for investors. (As is the case with the 1-click patent)
But, don't worry, patent law does contain a consideration for the public: the nightmare ends after 20 years, so that's why we're all really excited now about Photoshop 1.0 finally becoming patent-free. I hear there's a great operating system that will be patent-free in 2015!
Photoshop from exactly 20 years ago - the only way to reliably avoid software patent problems!
As one of the classic cases, I've been gathering some info already about this:
swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki, help welcome.
Bandwidth wasn't the problem. They need funding to keep going, so, to show how essential they are, they took everything off line and said they'll keep it off line until they receive enough donations to keep going. They hoped to be back on line by January 18th, but they're still off line.
I think it's a tactical blunder. They even broke all their links - instead of being redirected to a "we need donations", you just get a 404! Messers.
Make a backup. We don't want another case like Wikileaks, where a leaked draft goes online and then the site comes down for planning and doesn't come back up.
Whatever's in there about patents, please make notes here:
* http://en.swpat.org/wiki/Anti-Counterfeiting_Trade_Agreement
Thanks.
Getting patents out of ACTA is probably a very achievable goal. When we were working on an EU directive to criminalise violations of "IP", we raised a stink about the idea of becoming a criminal for violating any one of the 50,000 software patents which nobody could be expected to read.
That directive, like ACTA, was being pushed by the copyright industry. The second we make them nervous about the whole thing crumbling over patents, patents will disappear over night.
That's what's achievable, but only if we work on it. One very easy way to help is to document what's happening in ACTA regarding patents, and why software patents are terrible:
swpat.org is a publicly editable wiki, help welcome.
Can someone who knows these products tell me if these laptops will work well with free software, or are they are disaster like the Intel GMA500(right?) based laptops?
http://xkcd.org/701/
http://xkcd.com/539/
Having spent a few years as a lobbyist in the European Parliament during the EU software patents directive, I can tell you that it's very easy to affect the MEPs.
I learned that they're mostly lost, and the centre-left guy will vote your way just as quickly as the centre-right guy will, so which one you voted for doesn't make a huge difference, but talking to them does. (FWIW, the best party in there is clearly the Greens.) Tell them your concerns and show them your evidence. Showing evidence is essential so they can justify their vote.
A leaked copy was posted on wikileaks, but they took everything offline due to their financial problems. Does anyone have a copy of the leaked document? Please post it here, or add it to this public wiki:
The URLs for the relevant wikileaks docs were:
I haven't found it in archive.org or Google cache. Help sought, thanks.
Why does this matter so much? Once one (now two) countries reject OOXML, it means it cannot become *the* international/European document standard for the public sector.
I've only just started documenting this on swpat.org. It's a publicly editable wiki, help very welcome :
I found one patent they granted that they might be worried about:
(And a poster higher up found this application, which is still in the examination phase: 20090274392: page orientation detection based on selective character recognition.)
That one's just an application. Here's one they granted in 1994:
Rapid detection of page orientation
Everyone's going to make this smart ass joke, but there's actually a serious question here.
The USPTO grants patents for utter nonsense. Then, to maintain credibility, they have to abide by the law saying that all those nonsense things are illegal for 20 years.
If someone during a board meeting pointed out that rotating electronically received data communications was patented, the board would be required to decide to stop doing that (or license the patent, but maybe they can't, or maybe the patent holder said no).