Cybercrime and Patents in Europe 141
Hairy1 writes: "The Council of Europe has been working on a Cyber Crime Treaty for some time. The final version is now available, and makes interesting reading." The submitter points out that treaty signers will be obligated to create legislation, as the UK already has, to force people to disclose passwords and encryption keys to the authorities. The U.S. may well sign this treaty - we've participated in the drafting process. On a slightly different note, people are up in arms because the European Patent Office has decided, apparently on its own, that software programs are patentable. Update: 11/09 15:23 GMT by M : A reader sent in this interesting bibliography of the treaty's history.
Amusing. (Score:5, Insightful)
This is an interesting development. (Score:2, Insightful)
And everyone fighting against encryption... it's a losing battle. "Criminals" don't exactly pay attention to "the law", and if they're not completely braindead and know that a given piece of encryption software is crippled by the fact that the government has the keys to the backdoor, don't you think that they'll either use something else or maybe just not incriminate themselves via any digital media? Law-abiding citizens are the only ones that lose here, unless you like the idea of every Jane Government sticking their nose in your business whether you've done anything wrong or not.
On the bright side, if software becomes patentable, maybe this will strengthen the notion of Code As Speech in the US courts? I sure hope that the US legislators in charge of ratifying this bill (are there any? what body would be in charge of this?) runs this by the RIAA and MPAA before they sign it.
how the fuck (Score:1, Insightful)
An assembler or compiler is merely a filter for some text. This number when transfered to another processor type will generate complete different results, most likely garbage. Clearly the object code means different things to different processors, so they can't use binary.
Source code? Well that doesn't actually do anything other that represent algorithms, or thought process (pseudo code); which in turn represents free speech. You know, that thing the US used to have.
CoE - U.S. Law? (Score:2, Insightful)
Forced to disclose Passwords??? (Score:3, Insightful)
You would think that a law like this would violate everyone's '5th Amendment Rights':
nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself... full text [cornell.edu].
Being force to disclose passwords to authorities, IMHO, would be equivalent to testifying agaist yourself...
Re:Software isn't patentable... (Score:5, Insightful)
This is more or less how software patents are supposed to work over here in the U.S., too. However, because the PTO has pathetically little software expertise, the result is that you can patent pretty much any stupid idea that is obvious to everyone else if your patent description ends with "...on a computer!"
The other big problem with this is that the patent system is explicitly not supposed to cover algorithms or mathematical formulae, because these are deemed fundamental properties of nature. However, patenting software is a surprisingly easy backdoor to patenting algorithms. E.g. RSA Data Security and the RSA patent which held back public key cryptography by a decade or more, and would have been worse if RSA had succeeded in convincing the PTO that their patent actually covers all forms of PK crypto.
Re:Mathematics (Score:1, Insightful)
Very important things (Score:3, Insightful)
Second, the Council of Europe didn't write this law, the US did; as such, I wouldn't expect many (if any) continental EU countries to sign it, especially considering it may contradict some of their EU responsibilities and they'd rather be part of the EU than pass this law.
Third, if they somehow did pass this law, we could always create a country in Antarctica.
Why not? (Score:2, Insightful)
Genetic patents are patents on 'strings of numbers.'
Even most devices nowadays are designed using CAD type tools, meaning that they are simply strings of numbers as well. The fact that something can be represented numericaly dosn't really have any baring on anything.
Self Incrimination in Europe (Score:2, Insightful)
*Bangs head against the wall*
And what makes you think that every country in Europe has laws to protect self incrimination!
Example: The police "miranda warning" in the UK
Then the police will start asking you questions and "putting you on the spot"
Now tell me America, Where is my right to silence and my right to not incriminate myself!
Use Best Practices (Score:2, Insightful)
Or we need to develop an "under duress" password capability that destroys the data if used.
Whoops, I gave you the wrong password. My bad.
Re:Forced to disclose Passwords??? (Score:2, Insightful)
Similiarly, I fear that getting rid of provisions of the DMCA specified in the WIPO treaty won't be as easy as finding a reasonable judge and having him cast the "unconstitutional" spell on the law to make it go away. At least that treaty, however, allows nations to break it upon providing a certain amount of advance notice (1 year I believe), but that would involve going to the same people who ratified it in the first place...
This provision in the Constitution is why we Americans need to keep pressure on the President and Senate to ensure that treaties that take away Americans' civil liberties like this will not be tolerated by the American public. Unfortunately most of the American public doesn't care about these liberties and probably won't until they're all gone. We need to start teaching others why these treaties and domestic laws like SSSCA are so evil and we need to do it soon, otherwise we'll have no rights to try to defend anymore.
Re:Software isn't patentable... (Score:2, Insightful)
The former is sensible. Why should one not be able to enjoy the fruits of developing a partickularly efficient method to code a certain algorithm? People get patents for implementing algorithms in hardware all the time. What is an FPU anyway other than a bunch of algorithms implemented in Hardware? So why not patents on methods to implement algorithms in software?
The latter however is stupid becasuse it means that anyone who develops a method to code the same algorithm one has patented no matter how different his methods design is from ones own will be violating ones patent.
It is silly to write off the concept of Software patents in general just because a few brain-donors want to use them to monopolize common well known algorithms.
Don't you love how this works? (Score:3, Insightful)
It HAS happened and It DOES happen, EXACTLY like this. Let's not get fooled again.
Re:Mathematics (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the part on Mathematics:
First, note that the Patent office, evidently not being staffed by mathematicians, believe that they have not rendered mathematics patentable. Or, in other words, explanation-free protests based on the statement that they have will only confuse them, and cause them to distrust the protesters. After all, "These are a particular example of the principle that purely abstract or intellectual methods are not patentable."
I see three problems with this:
Therefore, despite protests from the Patent Office that mathematics are not patentable, damn near every discrete mathematics definition and algorithm is patentable, or close enough that a the prospect of fighting a patent would scare anybody.
(And frankly, I don't think we stand a chance in Hades of convincing them otherwise. The more ignorant you are, the more you think you know on a given topic, and I'd lay money these people honestly believe they know mathematics. Which means they will not listen to people like us.)