German High Court Declares All Software Patentable 330
FlorianMueller writes "Long gone are the times when Europe was that bastion of resistance against software patents and patents on such things as file systems were ruled invalid. In a decision published today, the Federal Court of Justice of Germany upheld a patent on the automatic generation of structured documents (such as XML/HTML) in a client-server setting. The ruling lays out general principles that go beyond the patent at stake: they tear down all barriers to software patentability in the largest EU member state, even though a European patent treaty has been adopted that was intended to exclude software from the scope of patentable subject matter. EU patent examiners recently warned against a drift toward software patents. Software patent critics in Europe fear this will spark more litigation on their continent and increasingly call for defensive measures."
Re:Noooooooo ! (Score:1, Interesting)
There goes the possibility for small innovative company to develop in a safe legal framework.
Good. That is exactly the goal. Patents are designed to protect the RnD investment of large wealthy businesses. The "it protects the little guy" notion was just a means of silencing the opposition. Patents only protect little guys in theory. In practice the little guys don't have enough money to litigate in defense of their patents, and wind up losing them anyway.
Re:Does it make a difference (Score:3, Interesting)
That, sir, is what we call a loophole in the interpretation of the law and it must be closed by changing patent law. Why is math any more patentable when you claim to execute it on a physical computing device than when you present it academically (i.e., executed on a human computing device)? The latter is legally non-patentable, so the former should be as well. This is the philosophical argument against software patents.
The only "process" involved in a software patent is the act of executing non-patentable mathematics on nonhuman computing hardware. However, the hardware itself was designed for the express purpose of executing mathematics, making the process neither novel nor nonobvious and thus non-patentable. This is what I believe to be the legal argument against software patents. IANAL, so please correct me if there is an error in my reasoning.
This legal argument has been ignored by patent offices and court systems alike. Only further clarification of patent law by legislative bodies will remedy the situation.
Bad Precedence - Design Patterns In Trouble (Score:3, Interesting)
that's it. welcome back to the dark age (Score:3, Interesting)
seriously, we're going all the way downhill back to the dark age.
it's censorship in australia, holding prisoners without charges in US and england, now with software patents, we'll see the resurgence of guilds.
it'll be such a fucked up environment, that only those who are members of a certain guild will be able to make any products in certain field, and if a new entrepeneur tries to enter the market, the established guild will throw all the wheight of the legal system on the new guy.
soon, access to information will be so restricted, that unless you're born in a certain class, you won't have any change of progress or innovating or "changing the world".
when is the first ship to mars leaving ? i'm starting to think that a cold, desert planet with no breathable atmosphere is not such a bad idea after all.
Re:Hello World (Score:3, Interesting)
> Isn't source code structured? Automatic code generation is quite ancient.
Yeh, but this patent is on doing that on a *limited resource* computer.
Code generation might be decades old, but do you really think anyone thought of doing code generation on a computer with less then 2Gb of RAM and less than a 1Ghz processor in the 70s or 80s?
Hat's off to Siemens for this stroke of genius.
Re:The Courts (Score:4, Interesting)
People need to understand that in most western countries, the judiciary is a kind of priesthood utterly divorced from reality or common sense.
Having read quite a few court cases in my years on slashdot, I would say they tend to be by far the most reasoned voices I've heard from any of the three branches of power. Very often you just get flaming insults with zero reading of the actual verdict.
To take one example, I read a US Appeals court decision that upheld EULAs. I'm sure you can imagine the flame fest, they were retards who shouldn't have made it out of grade school. I read the verdict, and basically their main focus was if the same happened elsewhere, for example like buying a plane ticket over the phone - tons of terms and conditions apply but they're not all read over the phone. They listed many examples but I didn't memorize them, but they found that this was accepted practice many places, the customer had not been mislead, the terms were not unusual for the software and even the name said something like personal edition, the refund possibility was explicitly made clear and basically he just wanted to get out of the contract because if the "personal use" restriction of the EULA didn't apply he could make lots of money. Even I that am against EULAs had to agree he looked like a dirtbag and so the court said you walked into this with open eyes and we're not going to spring you.
By the way, the "terms were not unusual" part was also the cause for another flame fest, the slashdot spin was like "if you expect to get screwed, it's okay to be screwed?!". Uh, yes in pretty much every case the court will look at what people normally get. If it's customary to sell a car with wheels then you'd better put it in the contract if there are no wheels, even though people would still call it a car without them. On the other hand if you still had some belongings in the glove compartment they'd naturally not be there. This is just common sense, and yet it became another reason to bash the courts.
Another good example is the Grokster case. Basically the Appeals court granted summary motion like "No way you can be held guilty of anything". The Supreme court stepped in and said "Eh, if they can prove the defendants sold it like a tool to break the law and encouraged people to break the law, they might" and reversed it for regular trial. As a legal principle it made perfect sense, even if a gun is legal you can't go around selling it like a great murder weapon targeting people in bad divorces making overt suggestions. The question was if Grokster was guilty of anything like that but nothing was ever proven or sentenced because they folded and that was the end of it, but of course the courts got the blame. Even though the opposite would have been complete and utter nonsense.
Your average court is usually fucked two ways, the laws as written and that they have to listen to every absurd legal theory a lawyer can come up with, giving them every possibility to have their day in court - see SCO. Just to take one of your examples, children convicted of child sex abuse, it's a problem that is entirely in law and should be fixed in law. How is it a judiciary problem that Congress didn't exclude self-molestation (lol at the term) from the law? What kind of legal basis would you like them to use, when there's not an ounce of unclarity in the law? You want them to just say "We don't like the rules, so we're changing them"? And in pretty much any story we get one person who think vigilantism from the jury bench should rewrite the law, because that won't lead to injustice because people hate the victim or love the perpetrator.
By far some of the worst are those that would like the courts to invent some new standards of legal certainty or otherwise make it such an impossible process that people can't ever get convicted, as long as it works in favor of the side slashdot is cheering for. Most usually that involves petty copyright infringers who are never guilty even when they're caught