Euro Patent Restart Demand Repeated by Parliament 204
sebFlyte writes "ZDNet UK is reporting that the European Parliament's Conference of Presidents has ratified and repeated the demands of the Parliament for the computer-implemented inventions directive to be sent back to the drawing board, even though the Commission has refused to re-start it after previous demands. From the article: "It is not certain that the Commission will comply with the request of the Parliament, nor that it will use the opportunity to draft a good text ... The new Commission is not obliged to follow the Parliament's request and they might still try to keep all options open and ask the Council to adopt the agreement of last May without a new vote, so as to gain even more options for themselves."
would this invalidate the GPL? (Score:1, Interesting)
Profit Anyone? (Score:5, Interesting)
Twats (Score:5, Interesting)
I want a close and strong European Union -- I just don't want this European Union.
I'd patent Paper-Shuffling... (Score:5, Interesting)
The players:
European Parliament's Conference of Presidents
the Commission
the Parliament
The new Commission
the Council
Ok, I'm lost. Though I think I can see why nothing's happening.
It reminds me of a The Committee Game someone wrote on our PDP11 about 25 years ago. (The committee forms to form a plan of action to deal with the nefarious Kally Spaeth, but first they head up to McDonalds for refreshments in the arcane Dodge Dart, and generally it's a lot of running around without actually doing anything about the nefarious Kally Spaeth. I think it was in parody.)
Re:would this invalidate the GPL? (Score:3, Interesting)
You are confusing patents with copyright.
The GPL conveys a concept for usage rights and copyright terms.
What the ?????? (Score:5, Interesting)
Does the EU even *have* a government? This is so confusing! Motions that can be executed with no vote, organizational groups that do what they want regardless of the vote? What gives? It's like the thing was designed *by*, bureucrats *for* bureaucrats, and voting is just a technicality.
Can somebody help to make me less ignorant and point me at an online EU-civics 101 tutorial that outlines how the EU government is organized, what are the responsibilities of the major components and a general overview of the rules?
Please?
EU Law Trails? (Score:4, Interesting)
The players:
- EU Parliament
- EU Commission
- EU Council
- Any others (like, eg, some kind of "EU Parliament/Council Reconciliation Committe")?
This is great news (Score:2, Interesting)
EU structure (Score:5, Interesting)
Conference of Presidents, Council, Commission, Parliament.... For the poor confused Americans among us, could somebody draw us the European equivalent of the "how a bill becomes law" flow chart? I'm completely lost.
--Bruce Fields
Re:EU structure (Score:2, Interesting)
-> 2. the draft is juggled between the comission and the parliament for years
-> 3. in case of a directive the member states can play with the law for a few years before putting it to force
-> 4. the comission tries to see if all the laws in member states are roughly the same that the comission and parliament passed
-> 5a. if a small member state has unlawful deviations from the law passed by comission and parliament, somekind of punishment takes place unless it's hastily corrected
-> 5b. if a large member state has unlawful deviations from tha law passed by comission and parliament, go back to #1
-> 6. ???
-> 7. a bill becomes a law
Re:Calling all Euros (Score:3, Interesting)
It's primarily a trading body, but has pretentions to be more than that.
The EU Commission is appointed by the individual member states, so whilst we can't vote for them directly we can kick out the morons who put them there.
The EU Parliament is directly elected, but has little actual power - there are too many vested interests to ever give it any real power... it makes decisions over minor matters.
The European Court is the bit that keeps the countries in line with their treaty obligations... they actually have the power to force governments to change their laws (the UK is often being slapped down these days because of its draconian 'anti-terrorist' laws like imprisonment without trial... we have out own camp X-Ray called Belmarsh, and the EU Court has basically ordered the government to close it).
There's another one I think (I thought there were 4 parts to the EU... might be wrong).
Yes, you've got a problem over there (Score:3, Interesting)
Who is in charge over there?
How is the government supposed to work?
Why do they vote on some things and not others?
Are there multiple mechanisms to pass laws?
Are the "parliament" and the "commission" similar to our "house" and "senate"?? That would explain the back and forth, but it doesn't look like they both need to approve of this thing to make it happen.
Regardless, I've told my european friends and coworkers to watch that their new government doesn't do like ours and take control from the states and later hand it over to large corporations. They all laughed.... even I didn't expect it to happen so quickly.
Re:What the ?????? (Score:1, Interesting)
Our government will hold a public vote on the issue if we agree to sign the European constitution, but they already said that if we all vote NO they will ignore the public vote. They already signed the damn thing without consulting the general voting public.
So if you think your US republicrats are bad, seems like Europe wants to be even better.
Of course, Europe cant agree on a single language or a place for the European parliament so there is 2,500 translators to translate all laws to/from every single European language and constant moving around of ALL people in the European parliament to their new temporary habitat.
With all this mess, I was betting my savings on USD and not EURO. Worked fine in the 1999-2000 timeframe I was working in the US. Unfortunately US politicians are even better at wasting money than our European version, so now I'm screwed.
Re:EU Law Trails? (Score:3, Interesting)
The European Commission [wikipedia.org]
The European Parliament [wikipedia.org]
The Council of the European Union [wikipedia.org]
It would be enough to reduce the enforcable period (Score:3, Interesting)
We're clever enough to come up with our own techniques in the short term to compete with closed source companies doing interesting short term things. I'd have no complaint with that level of competition. If a technique is really crucial and unavoidable, we can just wait a couple of years.
It's the medium to long term which is a problem, because we all converge on the same techniques - they are quite fundamental after all - and we need to be able to use our ideas in a reasonable time frame, not 27 years after having them...
A registry of techniques would be nice as a library, but it's not really workable for patent prevention.
Personally I come up with new techniques every day, as I'm sure many people here do. It's not feasible to write them all down, let alone register them in a formally searchable way. That's called "writing a book or article", and it's a lot of work in itself.
Part of the problem is that we've been inventing things at a rapid pace for decades, but most ideas are left unused and not written anywhere until an opportunity when it's _appropriate_ to use them crops up.
In other words, ideas sometimes get patented after lots of people have them, but before anyone actually uses them.
For example, IBM's patent on RCU - that's something I independently came up with when writing a small OS a decade before RCU was mentioned on the Linux lists. But, I didn't have a use for it in that OS (which I deleted all copies of anyway), and I can't prove prior art. I could have "published" it, but frankly publishing every idea like that is more work than it's worth.
I'm sure that has happened with many people here.
(I don't know the filing date of IBM's patent; that example is just to illustrate how potential prior art is easily lost).
If good ideas (of the currently patentable kind) were rare, then a registry would work. But when you're coming up with neat ideas daily, then if there was a registry of "official" prior art, a lot of ideas that people have had and maybe talked about would not have the chance to get in.
So even if there was a registry, we would still have unreasonable problems caused by the patent system.
-- Jamie
Re:Disgraceful FUD on BBC (Score:1, Interesting)
software patents are beyond absurd (Score:2, Interesting)
Civilization and "creative progress" existed for millenia before this scam of patenting software itself got invented, and that's all it is is a paperwork razzle dazzle shuffle scam. It happened during the rough time span when the financial phony products "industry" grifters were running out of other paper product snake oil scams to milk people out of their cash for. Been an expensive elaborate joke and skim and put the con on consumers ever since.
All this valuable "software patenting" stuff creates so called "patented products" that don't even have a normal consumer warranty with them, another *obvious* scam and rip off, and you have no right to resell, dissasemble, zip, like you would if you bought an honest tangible patented product, acme vacuum cleaner for instance. I don't need to sign a "license" to resell my vacuum cleaner at a yard sale,or repay the same fee yearly. I don't need to worry about "violating the law" if I take a screw driver to it, I don't need a "license to vacuum", I am not forced to destroy the vacuum rather than reselling it. But, "patented software" all that applies to conversationally speaking. Sorry, you may have the slickest program in the world, but the second there's a patent attached to it it becomes part of an elaborate fraudulent congame.
Copyright-acceptable more or less, but patent? HAHAHAHA!
As to those middle man skimmers with their "capital", they existed for millenia also, the planet has always been infested with moneychangers, so be it, they'll find a way to weasel their way into some other easy money con without software being patented. -> "the hedged derivative shortly to the longwise reverse floating point waved bond share of your perpetual debt note" or some ridiculous babbling noise like that. Software patents are a variant on that scam, nothing more. The software can be good bad or mediocre quality, that ain't the point, the point is the patent part is a middleman skim dodge. Easy to see, too. Those black suited grifters have amazing imaginations when it comes to getting out of their own productive work and using someone else's, so don't you worry none about them, in china or any place else, coming up with some way to "profit", they'll think up a few dozen more ways before noon if you take software patents back away from them at 8 am.