EU Parliament to Vote on New Patent Rules

peter_sd writes "The Register has an article discussing the implications to the open source community and small software businesses of the new software patent law to be voted on tomorrow by the EU parliament. According to the article, it is very likely the new patent law will be accepted despite its grave consequences."

Vote postponed, time to get organised

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Great News
The vote has been postponed until September 1st.
All info at:
http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/plen0626/index.en.ht ml [ffii.org]

This means we must have their attention.

Please contact your national FreeSoftware or digital-freedom group to organise an Adopt-an-MEP campaign. If the vote did take place tomorrow, we would lose but with the help of a few concerned citizens, we will win.

Ciaran O'Riordan

Petition

[zmooc]

If you don't like this - which you should:P, please sign this petition [eurolinux.org].

It exists: Prior Art DataBase

[ciaran_o_riordan]

Some people are already working on this, please work with them:

http://www.nongnu.org/padb/ [nongnu.org]

Development of the database is being worked on at:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/padb/ [nongnu.org]
and the software used is Free Software, available at:
http://savannah.nongnu.org/projects/topas/ [nongnu.org]

Lobbying EU MEPs is still the best thing we can do right now, people from any country can do this. I gave an example for what an American can do in a later post:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=69331&threshol d=0&commentsort=0&tid=155&tid=99&mode=thread&pid=6 327875#6328000 [slashdot.org]

Ciaran O'Riordan

Re:Good for them

[infolib]

intellectual property and patents are two fundamentally different things.

No. "Intellectual property" is used generally about exclusive rights to information in some form. See for instance the annex to the EU directive proposal on IP enforcement. It mentions copyright, trademarks, biopatents, denominations of geographical origin, semiconductor topography etc. Oh well, perhaps it's used differently in the US.

Re:Spreading FUD

[lpontiac]

I'm not aware of any case where Microsoft or any other big company is trying to shutdown an Open Source project using patent laws.

Microsoft used patents to kill ASF support in VirtualDub [virtualdub.org].

Re:It exists: Prior Art DataBase

[kramer2718]

Well, I have taken (some of) your advice. I have written a letter to most of the EU representatives from the UK. I enclose the text so that other slashdotters can use it in contacting any EU reps. I may not be the best rhetorician, and I certainly glossed over many technical details, but feel free to use/modify the following:

I am writing this because the European Union is considering a alteration of patent law to bring it in line with U.S. patent law particularly with respect to software patents. I am an american, and I understand that my government is placing great pressure on the European Union to change their patent policy. However, I can tell you that the patent policy here is extremely bad. In particular, software patents are a problem for several reasons. First, allowing software patents will encourage a glut of ridiculous patent applications. Second, in the software industry collaboration is a more effective strategy than protection. Third, the admittance of software patents would encumber the developement and innovation process with too many legal considerations.

As a computer programmer, I keep track of significant developements in the software industry, and there have been some very silly patents awarded lately. One aspect of programming is that software tends to build on other software. As such when a new technology such as the internet becomes available, many applications that may seem non-obvious to a lay person are fairly obvious to a skilled programmer. It's then only a matter of who gets to the patent office first. One example of this is the Amazon.com one-click-purchase patent. It is quite evident how to do this. It's also a fairly obvious idea. Yet the patent led to a lawsuit which took years to settle. Ask yourself this, "Would I like to see European Union courts burdened by such frivoities?" I hope the answer is "No".

Collaboration is especially in the software industry. In particular, the success of Open Source Software (or OSS) shows how successful cooperation can be. If you are not familiar with OSS, it is a software developement model in which the client can see the internal workings of a program and freely copy them. Often, OSS programs are distributed free of charge, also. Often, many people (sometimes as many as one million; mostly amateurs) will contribute to an OSS project. Some OSS projects have accomplished things that giant corporations never could. For instance, Linux and BSD are some of the best most stable operating systems around. Many companies such as IBM and Hewlett Packard use OSS as a starting point and build solutions for clients on top of it.

OSS has many advantages but is particularly vulnerable to software patents. Because the source code (internal representation) of the programs are available, patent owners can pick through the program to find an infringements where closed source programs do not have that problem. Also, because OSS projects are often undertaken by collectives of hobbyists and altruistic amateurs, if there is an accusation of patent infringement, there are not usually funds to fight in court. In this way, a corporation could stop an OSS competitor by just filing suit. If this ever became common practice, it would be the end of Open Source Software and the technolgical world (not just the computer industry) would suffer immensely.

The process of software developement does not need to be encumbered with the patent process. Software evolves rapidly and if developers have to do a patent search every time they write a program, software developement would grind to a halt. (You may think it unlikely that a programmer could accidentally write a patented program, but I assure it is not; note the above Amazon.com case, several auction patents, various interface patent; there are many more).

In closing I implore you to vote against software patents or at least to restrict the term. Drug companies may need 20 years to recoup developement costs, but the software industry moves much faster than that. Often a granted patent is many years obsolete by the time it expires.

Vote was postponed to September

[Balaitous]

It is known since Thursday 26 June that the vote will not occur on 30 June. Despite pressure from the pro-patent UK labour rapporteur Arlene McCarthy, the conference of group presidents in the Parliament has decided that the vote in plenary will occur only in September.
A little more time to convince Members of the European Parliament of all parties of the the common sense decision: rejecting patents for software ideas and information processing methods.

We have three weeks

[JPMH]

Sorry to repeat myself [slashdot.org], but the time for action and contacting MEPs is now

The truth is, we have about three weeks to go, because for most of the summer the MEPs are away on holiday.

To be more precise:

• Next week [30/06 - 04/07] we can lobby in Strasbourg (Session).
• The week after [07/07 - 11/07] we can lobby in Brussels (Committee meetings).
• ... after that there is no official business scheduled all summer ...
• Finally [25-29/08] there is one week in Brussels before the September session which starts on 1st September.

Even then, attendence for the two outlying committee meeting session-weeks in Brussels is notoriously poor.

The MEPs' UK constituency offices stay open over the summer, but politics in Brussels essentially shuts down.

Most of the political groups will decide in Strasbourg this week what line they will take, before all the MEPs go away.

I've seen him speak

[pjc50]

I saw him at a conference in 2000 on "Collaboration and Ownership in the Digital Environment" - a big multidisciplinary thing on IP. He was as you say, a prepared, coherent and persuasive speaker.

Then the next speaker came on, an EU patent lawyer, to describe the current system. He pointed out that you can already patent software in the EU, you just have to use the right phrasing. Somewhere in the middle of this, RMS went bersek and started ranting from the audience. People had to persuade him to leave before the lawyer could continue.

If that had been, say, an internal EU consultation on patents, someone would have called security and that would have been the end of the Free Software community's involvement in the process.

RMS is not always a zealot, but flashes of zealotry are just too inappropriate for the modern political environment. A different representative is needed for that, and one has not yet appeared.

The people's wishes & EU/UK government

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

I think the article went on to say that despite it being against the people's wishes, it was going to pass. It's what the US wants, and it's what the corps want. It doesn't matter what the people think.

In Europe, both at EU level and in many countries within it, it's quite normal for governments to come down heavily in favour of a particular piece of legislation to begin with, but then to back off rapidly if faced with a backlash of popular opinion. The fact that this has been brought up now doesn't mean it will automatically get passed as it stands.

As for what the US or its big corps want, you're obviously not very familiar with Europe. With the notable exception of Tony Blair supporting Bush's invasion of Iraq (and in that case, look how the rest of Europe acted), Europeans aren't exactly known for towing the US party line. Our legal systems and governing bodies don't seem to be nearly as susceptible to corporate influence and bribes as the US equivalents.

Personally, here in the UK, I put this down to having more than two political parties with significant power, and bizarrely enough to having the House of Lords (our unelected second chamber, whose members normally stay for life, which the government is currently trying to do away with) as a check and balance on the whims of any incumbent majority party. But I digress...

Getting back to the plot, it does matter what the people think here, and if enough people make reasoned, informed objections, the politicians' opinions are likely to change. The problem, as the linked article in el Reg so insightfully noted, is that the average person complaining about this gets up on his holier-than-thou high horse and starts ranting. That will have exactly the opposite effect to what the advocates want, and let's face it, it probably deserves to.

By the way, MEP = Member of the European Parliament, who are elected representatives from European member states. How much real power they have is debatable, because there are other bodies involved at Europe level besides the EP, but certainly they have a significant influence on European policy.

MP = Member of Parliament, an elected representative of a national government (in the UK, and possibly elsewhere, though I don't know of any other country that uses that specific term). These guys do have real power. However, under current international agreements, certain "guidance" from Europe is pretty much required to be incorporated into national law in its member states within a defined timescale after it is passed at Europe level.

Thus MPs must pass laws that respect the European direction, and under some circumstances cases within the UK can wind up being taken to Europe if the UK law is inadequate in this regard. Human rights issues have seen several such cases since Europe passed much stronger HR rules than the UK used to have not so long ago.

Hey assh*le

[SunPin]

That's my post and my signature. You think you're clever, right? I wonder how many other posts you've stolen.