EU Moves Toward Software Patents 322
edooper writes "Apparently the patent discussion in Europe has taken a turn for the worse. According to the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure: 'This Wednesday, the Irish Presidency managed to secure a qualified majority for a counter-proposal to the software patents directive, with only a few countries - including Belgium and Germany - showing resistance. This proposal discards all limiting amendments from the European Parliament and reinstates the laxist provisions from the Commission, adding direct patentability of data structures and process descriptions as icing on the cake. In a remarkable sign of unity in times of imminent elections, members of the European Parliament from all political groups are condemning this blatant disrespect for democracy in Europe.' Read more: swpat.ffii.org."
Re:I'll probably get modded down for this but... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What oo Software Patents Have to Do... (Score:4, Informative)
The Irish Polticians have a cozy setup with MS.
Re:What oo Software Patents Have to Do... (Score:3, Informative)
not happy? Then SIGN THE PETITION! (Score:5, Informative)
http://swpat.ffii.org/group/todo/index.en.html [ffii.org]
Sign a petition here...
http://petition.eurolinux.org/index_html?LANG=en [eurolinux.org]
When I signed the number of signatures was 322888, A MILLION ARE NEEDED!!!!
Best Regards,
#322889
Re:Ethics of Intellectual Property (Score:3, Informative)
Maybe because authors didn't have their own press like they do now. The whole issue never came up before Gutenburg.
I think you're looking at this issue wrong--you're right in what you say here, but the REASON the problem didn't exist is because copying/producing copies was expensive as hell PERIOD.
U.S. didn't care much about enforcing IP until it had acquired a significant amount of its own. The pirates and "criminals" of yesterday's societies are what gave us today's freedoms.
don't get what your point is at all--last I checked, the constitution and the basis for the entire american system of govt began in the 1770's and 80's. If you have any evidence that the constitution was originally intended to deny the possibility of IP, please enlighten me.
By the way, the first copyright law came about in 1710.
That's not really true--If we're talking British legal system (and ergo, the highly derivative american system) the law of 1710 you cite was the first parliamentary act, however common law had been dealing with these issues for at least 200 years. Common law doesn't mean illegitimate.
Right now, copyright is being used to protect the publishing middle man more than anyone else. This is necessary to insure that creators will be dependant on them (requiring that they sign over their rights, etc,) forever if possible.
this is of course your interpretation, and not one that I agree with, having worked in the publishing industry. I will say that I don't like the current copyright laws, where rights can be extended 76 or whatever numbers of years past death. personally I think 30 years is probably a pretty good number.
Also let it be said that IP goes MUCH farther than just copyrights, so it's rather limiting to only discuss copyright.
How "democracy was subverted" (Score:5, Informative)
My understanding of what happend is something like:
- The patent office comes out with a wishlist.
- The EU Parliment votes it down and puts some strict limits on software patents.
- The Parliment vote is passed to some bureaucrats to clean up and make into 'proper' laws (it's now out of the Parliament's hands).
- The bureaucrats rip out all of the changes made by parliament, and add a few options that weren't even in there to begin with.
- The president -- currently held by Ireland -- (and literally sponsored by Microsoft [eu2004.ie]) manages to get his EU Council of Ministers to accept this bureaucrat-mangled edit.
Voila! democracy subverted!Re:How would this work? (Score:5, Informative)
The theoretical benefit of patents is that companies would publish their formats. But in practice, patents aren't very helpful to someone else implementing the format, especially if the patents were never intended to be licensed. Data format patents would be used primarily to expand monopolies - any company with over 50% market share could benefit from limiting interoperability with competing products. This would be bad enough to offset the potential gains, and much worse than the status quo. At least now, though reverse engineering is difficult, you are allowed to use what you learn.
Re:I'll probably get modded down for this but... (Score:1, Informative)
A bit off topic.
Re:Ridiculous. (Score:1, Informative)
And the same goes if you are working in the steel industry on creating new steel production processes - you would have to keep up with the state of the art to ensure that you don't infringe a patent. I don't see how software is any different and why, based on this argument, it should be a special case. The problem is frivolous patents of trivial processes or patenting things with prior art. Patents on steel processing is not necessarily a problem for you, it seems, but I think we'd both agree that allowing someone to patent heating it to 1 degree more than you do in the process now should not be patentable.
Problem with ireland (Score:2, Informative)
The problem being that Ireland, with no own major industries whatsoever, is heavily dependent of the major corporations and doing what they want. I guess these patent things are a consequense of Ireland being "good dog" in the leaches of Big Corporations.
The battle is not yet won and not yet lost (Score:5, Informative)
On 17-18th of May, there will be a real vote by the Council of Ministers. If they vote against software patents - we win.
If Council of Ministers votes for software patents then the bill will return to european Parlament for a re-discussion, which will be postproned to September due to elections.
There we will have the chance to discuss this again, this time with a new European Parlament.
Note: the previose EPclearly stated AGAINST software patents.
Re:Cut the xenophobic crap... (Score:5, Informative)
Both USPTO and the new directive violate the TRIPS and the Berne convention which both USA and EU signed.
TRIPS article 12. says that software is to be considered a literary work.
Berne convention clearly states that literary works are not patentable.
The problem is that the European Council and the Irish Presidency claim that their proposition doesn't allow software patents, but that is such a pile of bullshit.
Re:We are better than you silly Yanks! (Score:4, Informative)
It is to me, though. And I'm not alone in this.
The EU is not fundamentally a bad thing. The close cooperation between european states has allowed me, at least, to grow up in a Europe where war is unthinkable for the first time in - well, forever, basically. All these processes you hear about, like that single coin, bring our countries closer together and join them more and more in a unified whole. And that is good. But occasionally we get excesses, such as in this case, and that's something we must fight.
Misleading (Score:3, Informative)
Interesting enough today the old dutch politician Bolkestein returned back to dutch national politics. He has spent several years in brussels and suddenly has aborted his job there. Now why would he return so swiftly all of a sudden?
Bolkestein didn't "abort" his job. He merely announced that he doesn't want a second term as European Commissioner. He will stay on until the end of the current term on November 1st. Hardly a "swift" return.
Re:Data structures (Score:3, Informative)
No! The courts have continually prevented patent owners from enforcing their rights in circumstances that would restrict competition: and interoperability is one of them.
In the UK, the famous British Leyland case found this. It is codified in UK copyright and designs law.
Re:Cut the xenophobic crap... (Score:3, Informative)
here we go again! (Score:2, Informative)
Firstly, the EU directive just _harmonises existing case law_ - without the directive, what's going to happen is that different EU states are going to take different approaches and thus it will be a nightmare.
Secondly, the EU directive _actually reduces the degree of software patentability_, because currently after IBM, claims to "programs on a carrier" are allowed, but the directive removes the ability to claim this. This is a good thing.
Thirdly, it's been stated over and over again that there are "multiple software business models" at work in Europe, and there's no specific reason to favour closed model approaches to open model approaches: they all work, and provide revenue and so on.
Fourthly, in terms of "software patents blocking open source", well there's a very small list at GNU when Stallman asked which projects were being affected by patents, and in fact this is how it should work: it's to be expected that some patent owners have developed inventive appraoches that they are holding away from open source - fair enough, it's the perojative. It doesn't seem as though Linux, OpenOffice, mysql and numerous other open source products have been affected anything more than trivially. There's only FUD being suggested that "it might be a problem" in the future.
Fifthly, the EU always maintains more stricter examination than the US: business methods per se are _not_ patentable in the EU, and equally, flakey software patents have a harder time getting through. Stop transposing the failures of USPTO into the EU.
Sixly, for the so called "30,000" illegal software patents issued over the last 30 or so years or whatever, I repeat that the GNU list suggests that less than 0.01% of these are impacting open source. That's amazing! And hardly a justification to pull the system apart.
Finally, the protests in Brussels are are a laugh: against multimillion dollar turnover businesses using patents and contributing to the wellbeing of the EU economy, you have a bunch of jokers with "terrorism is corporate suicide" and other fairly poor and non-objective slogans doing pantomines. Unless the arguments show facts and figures, and more substantive evidence, this is entirely dismissable.
Educating your legislators may help! (Score:3, Informative)
Denmark was one of the countries that showed some resistance to the
Irish proposal. Now, three weeks ago, most people in the Danish
government and ministries seemed unaware of the negative impacts of
software patents on interoperability. However, an effort by many to
educate the legislators seems to have helped.
That said, as a leaked(?) document [ffii.org]
with the current proposed patent directive shows, Denmark
unfortunately has proposed RAND licensing for interoperability-related
patents (see the footnotes on page 10.)
We Danes will need to work on fixing that mistake. Hopefully other
Europeans will try to get their government to change their vote.
According to FFII, only ONE country needs to change its mind to shift
the balance of power in the EU council!
Re:here we go again! (Score:3, Informative)
"Firstly, the EU directive just _harmonises existing case law_ - without the directive, what's going to happen is that different EU states are going to take different approaches and thus it will be a nightmare."
No the European patent office started allowing software patents, this gives a legal basis for those patents.
"Secondly, the EU directive _actually reduces the degree of software patentability"
The Parliaments suggestions were valid and carefully thought through.
I've read ffii's comment's and they are valid too, the Commissions wording is full of holes.
If Pariament & People's comments didn't have validity then why seek to prevent those comments being expressed? Why not just argue your case to EU Parliament?
"Thirdly, it's been stated over and over again that there are 'multiple software business models' at work in Europe, and there's no specific reason to favour closed model approaches to open model approaches: they all work, and provide revenue and so on."
So? What has that to do with anything, the risk is that a monopoly player will be able to lock out competitors, the Parliament proposed a solution to this, the Commission didn't.
Whether that competition comes from closed or open source is irrelevant.
"Fourthly, in terms of 'software patents blocking open source',
Your comment pre-supposes that the directive represents the status quo and it certainly doesn't.
This *changes* the law, if it didn't there wouldn't be any point in having it! So whether patents *currently* affect MySql etc. or not is irrelevant.
"Fifthly, the EU always maintains more stricter examination than the US: business methods per se are _not_ patentable in the EU, and equally, flakey software patents have a harder time getting through. Stop transposing the failures of US into the EU."
Good, but the wording proposed by the Commission is fluffy. For example FFII comments on the "technology" issue are correct.
The Commissions wording does allow patents whose technology part is simply that they execute on a computer. Parliament's wording is tighter meaning that the invention has to represent improved technology.
Since any business process can be run on a computer, it allows business process patents simply by virtue of sloppy wording.
Parliament did a good job.
"Finally, the protests in Brussels are are a laugh: against multimillion dollar turnover businesses using patents and contributing to the wellbeing of the EU economy"
It's not in the interests of the European economy to allow a few patent holders to lock themselves into the their markets. Even if that patent holder is Nokia.
Being pro-competition isn't the same as being anti-business.
Re:here we go again! (Score:4, Informative)
Secondly, the EU directive _actually reduces the degree of software patentability_, because currently after IBM, claims to "programs on a carrier" are allowed, but the directive removes the ability to claim this.
No, article 5.2 of the new Council draft overturns the parliament text, and explicitly permits program claims.
Fifthly, the EU always maintains more stricter examination than the US: business methods per se are _not_ patentable in the EU, and equally, flakey software patents have a harder time getting through. Stop transposing the failures of US into the EU.
Patents directed at improving methods of doing business have previously been disallowed by UK case law. This will be overturned by the directive, which will bring the UK into line with EPO practice, allowing patents for improved business methods which contain a "technical contribution".
The EPO's standards of what constitutes a "technical contribution" can be judged from the Amazon gift-ordering patent, where a patent was granted on the process of:
1. X choosing a gift from Amazon to send to Y
2. Amazon asking Y where to send the gift to
3. Amazon sending the gift
This apparently is a "technical contribution" to the state of the art, and therefore patentable.
Finally, the protests in Brussels are are a laugh: against multimillion dollar turnover businesses using patents and contributing to the wellbeing of the EU economy, you have a bunch of jokers with "terrorism is corporate suicide" and other fairly poor and non-objective slogans doing pantomines. Unless the arguments show facts and figures, and more substantive evidence, this is entirely dismissable.
Actually, as a photo-opportunity it was quite successful. And as a chance to get people concerned about software patents together in a festive environment, it was very successful.
But you may be interested to know that it was followed by a four hour conference, attended by leading MEPs and addressed by leading economists, with representatives from the Commission and the EPO also on the panels.
If you're a subscriber to LWN, there's a report about the gathering by Tom Chance on the latest weekly front page. If you're not a subscriber, the page becomes freely available next Thursday.
(more points to follow)
No, it is correct (Score:3, Informative)
If they confirm it, only then we are in the situation you describe.
Re:...it's OK....we can still blame MS (Score:3, Informative)
Though it's good that the Australian Computer Society (ACS) seem at last to have woken up to the dangers.
(Report [news.com.au] , 4 May).
Re:It is not MS vs. Linux, it is Patents vs. Linux (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What will be patented? (Score:1, Informative)