EU Says No To Software Patents 525
Moggie68 writes "European parliament has . struck down the proposal for a directive that would have brought US-style software patents into EU." Here's another story on the decision.
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EU Says No To Software Patents
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Solutions are obvious if one only has the optical power to observe them over the horizon. -- K.A. Arsdall
This is truely... (Score:2, Insightful)
It ain't over untill the fat lady sings. (Score:5, Insightful)
Historic day for Europe! (Score:4, Insightful)
Today we're a bit closer to freedom
Well done!! (Score:5, Insightful)
For the time being I can rest assured that working as a programmer I do not have to watch my every statement.
Is it over? I doubt it, but we're closing in (Score:5, Insightful)
Responding to the rejection the European Commission said it would not draw up or submit any more versions of the original proposal. .
Sounds like excellent news, but I doubt they'll give it up just yet, but this is a major setback (another one) for them.
Re:Victory (Score:5, Insightful)
Personally my only problem with software patents is the length. I think that an 18-36 month patent is reasonable but anything over that is not.
Power to the Parliament! (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Victory! (Score:5, Insightful)
Not just that, but it was a great day for European democracy, with the EU's elected body asserting itself totally over the unelected, untransparent Council.
Re:Victory! (Score:2, Insightful)
Just think about that for a moment.
648 votes to 14. That's how utterly wrong this bill was. There can't be many bills which have taken such a beating in the history of the EU, can there?
Now as European Citizens it is out duty to write to the 14 fuckwits who voted for the bill and ask them simply "Why?". Then make sure they loose at the next European Elections.
Re:Not quite (Score:4, Insightful)
"Patents will continue to be handled by national patent offices
At least it shows that politicans do not just blindly follow. If this continues, it will be difficult for national politicans to accept something the EU has rejected (more than once, this was a re-write wasn't it?)
Mixed blessing (Score:3, Insightful)
One very good outcome of this is that the average European Joe Schmoe is now more aware of the issue and the MEPs are more aware of the sentiments within the industry. No more will the pro-patent lobby be able to sneak software patents in through the back door. That, in itself, is a huge victory.
A huge thanks to everybody who helped defeat the directive, be it with a single short e-mail to an MEP or actively spending hundreds of hours on the issue.
Thank you!
Re:It ain't over untill the fat lady sings. (Score:4, Insightful)
Tonnerre
Today we made history... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Historic day for Europe! (Score:5, Insightful)
Not to rain on the parade or anything, but aren't we exactly as close as before? I mean it's still exciting that we aren't further from freedom than yesterday...
~p
Re:Victory! (Score:5, Insightful)
The patent lobbyists will be back, if not in the EU then in every national parliament. Congratulations to the FFII, in stopping this and putting the spotlight on the software patent issue. It's a huge achievement.But this is only the first battle.
It's worth a lot of money to Microsoft and front organisations like the BSA to shut down competition using patents, hopefully with the issue now more widely known they will find it increasingly difficult to spread lies and buy off politicians.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:It's possible that certain types of patents are (Score:3, Insightful)
Except that the underpinnings of all the abstractions the average programmer uses are mathematically based.
I don't think we can patent the basics of logic either, so even when the syntax actually doesn't have any numbers, it's basic reasoning is still mathematical.
And honestly, I can't think of an actual programming language that doesn't use mathematical operators of some kind. Even VBScripting uses it in some bastardised fashion.
It sounds like the ostrich head-in-the-sand argument. I can't see it, hence it doesn't exist.
Re:It ain't over untill the fat lady sings. (Score:2, Insightful)
No victory, just unresolved (Score:5, Insightful)
EPO (the European Patent Office) still have given out several thousands patents for software (and they continue to do so). These are not void until they are tried individually in court.
Så, basically there could be three results:
1. The directive was accepted with the possibility of software patents (which would be preferred for pro-patent-people)
2. The directive was accepted without the possibility of software patents (which would be preferred for con-patent-people)
3. The directive was dropped
The latter is the case. So there are no general guidelines. Of course this still means that bunch of patents wouldn't hold in court, but that road is much longer than a general guideline preventing the patents in the first place.
Re:Next: the US (Score:5, Insightful)
In order to compete with Europe, I think "harmonization" with their patent policies is exactly what we should be fighting for now.
Re:Victory! (Score:3, Insightful)
I believe the real crooks here are the Commission, not the Council, but your point is just as valid in that case.
NOT a dupe (Score:3, Insightful)
Thus, there existed the chance that they might get a change of heart etc. and vote YES instead...
We already had prematurely celebrated the Patent Directive dead once already - when Sweden etc. said it wanted to move it from a A-point to a B-point, but then was basically ignored by the Council during the meeting - and the Directive was passed to the EP for second reading.
NOW we can say that the Directive, in its current form, is dead.
Comment removed (Score:2, Insightful)
Gray area getting slightly whiter though (Score:5, Insightful)
The EPO (European Patent Office) has granted patents on algorithms for years, despite the fact that they are illegal under the current European legislation [european-p...office.org]. And it seems that the fight will go on there (cf. this article [bloomberg.com]).
However, considering today's vote, the patent offices can not anymore claim that their interpretation of the law have a political backup.
--Go Debian!
Re:Victory! (Score:5, Insightful)
Votes against (Score:3, Insightful)
If anyone has a list it would certainly be useful when the next elections roll around.
Cheers,
Noims.
Re:Not quite (Score:3, Insightful)
Nope: "Patents will continue to be handled by national patent offices
Source [bbc.co.uk]
Re:Note (Score:3, Insightful)
Hopefully the next proposal which is going to happen sooner or later is better from the beginning. I hope that in next time, SME's and OSS-community are represented when the initial drafts for the directive are made.
This time the rejection of the whole proposal was better than amending it into lawyers' wet dream.
Re:Not quite - bis (Score:5, Insightful)
Microsoft, Nokia and co will try again, in a few years time. Except that they won't do anything as overt as trying to pass a pan-European directive. They'll work quitely, behind the scenes, on the ministers of individual European governments. Pure-software-patents will be legalised, once country at a time.
Once this process is complete, they may then go for another pan-European directive, that really would merely 'harmonise' the EU countries' patent laws. Only by then, it will be to late, since the damage will have already been done at the level of individual countries.
Don't let it get that far. Keep your ears open and stay on the lookout for any pro-pure-software-patent legislation that may reach your parliament.
#include
Re:It's possible that certain types of patents are (Score:5, Insightful)
This is possibly the most idiotic statement I have ever read. In what way is software not entirely a mathematical field? Have you the slightest inkling of what computer science is?
Software, in all its forms, from the highest level Haskell to the tightest x86 machine code, from the elegance of Scheme to the pure sickness of Befunge, is represented as regular groups of symbols encoded in a numerical form. The abstract machines that give meaning to these symbols can also be encoded in any of these forms . The presence of hardware is incidental : everything that has been done or can be done with software is performable by a purely mental process. How anyone can believe this does not qualify as a field of pure mathematics is beyond me.
In summary, you don't have a clue what you are talking about. I think a better statement might be
"This isn't 3000BC where mathematics is simply solving mathematics problems."
Re:Not quite (Score:5, Insightful)
The emphasised phrase is legally and semantically meaningless in the context of deciding whether a patent should pass review. It is nothing more than a lawyerly weasel-phrase used to slip pure software patents under the radar.
The 2001 consultation was a complete sham, little more than a pro-pure-software-patent PR exercise. This has been widely discussed on anti-software-patent forums.
See http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=154904&cid=12
Re:I think I speak for most of us when I say (Score:5, Insightful)
The only sad thing is the feeling of surprise this generated...
Re:Postponement, not a victory. (Score:1, Insightful)
Crusade against an insignificant minority (Score:3, Insightful)
648 MEPs all voted to reject the directive, but for how many different reasons? This number probably includes both supporters of software patents who feared an amended directive (for no good reason, I should add) and those who were angry at the Council for scrapping all the amendments already made by the Parliament back in 2003. I don't think it means 648 MEPs are decidedly opposed to software patents.
I don't know who those 14 were, but I'd like to know. However, I wouldn't rule out they may have included one or two brave individuals who wanted to give the 21 Rocard-Buzek-Duff amendments a chance (to reject software patents, rather than reject the directive). If your purpose with asking "why" is to identify potential allies, then fine, but why not ask all the other MEPs the same question?
If I understand correctly, the plan was to go through all the 178 (?) amendment proposals and vote on each one, after which a final vote would be held on whether the directive was now in an acceptable state or should be rejected anyway. The advice from FFII was to first vote for the 21 Rocard-Buzek-Duff amendments, but later vote to reject the directive if those amendments didn't achieve the necessary majority.
Now the proposal to reject the directive was made already before the amendments, meaning that we will never know how our elected representatives would have voted on the issues of substance, and I fear that may have been yet another reason for some MEPs to vote "no" early - they preferred not to show their cards if they didn't have to. In that light, kicking 14 MEPs in the back for asking to see the result of 178 amendment votes seems like a bad idea. They are too small a group to even be concerned about, and you will only encourage future MEPs to take the safe option and vote in unison like a flock of sheep, regardless of the issue.
Looks like we DOSsed this bill out of existence (Score:5, Insightful)
Here is the slightly worrying meat of the matter (from TFA):
So it seems that the bill was not voted down because the anti-SWPAT people were able to persuade the voters of the rightness of their cause, but that it was spammed with amendments until it collapsed under its own weight.
Still a good thing, of course, but it would have been nicer to have this stupid idea explicitly faced down.
Re:It's possible that certain types of patents are (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you think that all of maths is simple arithmetic? I hope you realise that apply is a mathematical operator : this is what you would refer to as "calling a method". Defining a function is an equation. Do I really have to spell it out for you? Everything in your programs is mathematical. Not necessarily arithmetical. Please learn the difference.
Practically all programming language semantic research is couched in the terms of category or set theory. That you don't know this doesn't mean it isn't so. Look it up if you have more than a passing interest in your career.
When a patent claims something like the "method of drag and drop", it is claiming that all possible symbolic forms that implement this method are infringing. These forms, like every program you have ever written, are mathematical. The big issue is that the form is not being claimed as in a copyrighted work or a physical patent: it is the very concept of solving the problem that is being claimed. Once you have spotted a problem, you immediately control all possible solutions.
Re:Next: the US (Score:5, Insightful)
And the guy with the biggest Nuclear bombs still feels he has God on his side.
A major battle is over but the war is continuing.
They won't give up (Score:4, Insightful)
As for the US needing patent reform? Yeah, it's pretty clear to "us" from our perspective, but the average joe doesn't care one way or the other but the moment they hear "they are trying to stop us from patenting things" the public will conjure up images of Ben Franklin and Thomas Edison tinkering in their home laboratories and think how un-American it would be to prevent people from patenting stuff. It has to be shown how it hurts them before the public will care about this and telling them "hey, you could have had much cooler and cheaper stuff..." it's a particularly effective argument since it's essentially viewed as speculation rather than fact.
It's easier to see in Europe what the potential harm to their market would be -- the U.S.'s head start in patent portfolios would make the sting pretty obvious.
So then I wonder, what angle or spin would be most effective against the general public to help them understand the need for patent reform in the U.S.?
But who voted YES? (Score:4, Insightful)
Can I suggest you write and thank your MEP? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Next: the US (Score:5, Insightful)
Democracy is not about votes, but about influence. It doesn't matter if everyone can vote if the vote doesn't mean anything, or if how people vote is largely influenced by the funding available to the various candidates, or if the election system is biased towards certain candidates.
The election system is the first flaw - by penalising votes for outsiders it creates an entrenched situation where only very rich people (i.e. Ross Perot) or the two major parties have a fighting chance of winning. That in itself means that even if the majority of Americans in advance of the next election wanted a major change, and a candidate matched what they wanted, that candidate would be unlikely to stand a chance because most voters would see it as too risky.
The funding available has a similar level of importance - remember the level of support Perot was able to get? It was a direct result of having access to funding that enabled him to reach a large audience. Try picking a random candidate from the last two elections and asking people on the street if they know who he/she was, and most of them won't know. That means that effectively, the office of President is closed to anyone not palatable to a majority in one of the major parties, or wealthy enough for a major PR blitz.
It's tragic that so many people believe blindly in a system just because they are a allowed a vote. People were allowed to vote under Saddam Hussein as well, and we all know - regardless of whether or not we support the war - that those votes were worthless. No other comparisons intended - just an example of how being allowed to vote says nothing about whether or not a country is democratic.
That said, at the moment I live in the UK, which has an election system about as shitty as the US one (i.e. Labour holds an absolute majority in parliament despite not getting anywhere near the majority of votes, thanks to one man circuits), as does France and a number of other European countries, most of the above apply in varying degress to many other countries as well.
Re:It's possible that certain types of patents are (Score:4, Insightful)
A pure mental process that is based on consistent symbolic manipulation is extremely difficult to paint as anything but maths. What do you think it is ? Interpretive dance? Woodcraft?
I would love to know what you believe mathematics is. I'm guessing that you think it is arithmetic.
And as to your MS : the standards for getting a degree in this field are shockingly bad. I know people with even less clue than you who have degrees in CS. I have one too, but I don't think that it alone proves anything. Your statements show that you are very confused.
Re:Wow. (Score:3, Insightful)
That's clearly not the case with you, though. You know exactly how other people should vote, and if they don't vote that way, they're wrong.
Uhuh.
Re:Pre-emptive strike (Score:3, Insightful)
Bad outcome: CIID passed as tabled by the Commission and their backers, Microsoft, Nokia, etc.
Good outcome: CIID amended to prohibit software patents (~367 majority required)
Neutral/okayish outcome: CIID defeated at second reading; patent situation remains as is (software patents prohibited by European Patent Convention, but individual countries allow them anyway)
Today, the good guys couldn't be sure of the 367 votes necessary to pass their ammendments. Therefore they chose the safe option, and voted to reject the CIID entirely.
Microsoft, Nokia et al will on no account allow a directive to be passed that prohibits pure software patents, so they had their MEPs likewise vote to reject the CIID, rather than risk having the ammendments of M. Rocard and co. be implemented.
Re:It's possible that certain types of patents are (Score:4, Insightful)
If I have the rules to the machine, abstract or physical, and I have the code, then I can laboriously perform the instructions. Are you seriously denying that this is the case? Can you imagine doing one instruction?
push 20h
Can you imagine doing the next one?
call 401010
Oh look, by induction, you can imagine performing the whole program. Big fucking surprise.
I never said it would be easy or fun, or that it would finish in a single lifetime. But clearly it can be performed as a mental process.
On to planes. Planes, and all other mechanical devices, work because they obey physical "laws". These laws are mathematical generalisations that we have tested against the world for a long time and failed to disprove. The maths does not generate the laws, it is merely a statement about them. That we can use the maths to design other physical items does not mean that these items are suddenly pure maths. They simply obey the same "constant conjunctions" that we have observed for everything else in the physical world. Read some Hume, ingrate.
Your logical fallacies are unbeatable. Keep it up.
Re:It's possible that certain types of patents are (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:It's possible that certain types of patents are (Score:4, Insightful)
So you really do beleive that mathematics is just arithmetic. I think this is where the disconnect is: mathematics is by its very nature the process of abstraction that you use to get away from any other representation you already have. It is not just adding and dividing, or other simple operators you learned when you were two.
Look up some fields of more abstract maths: category theory, topography, etc. Are you going to advocate promoting a small field of discrete maths to being "not maths" merely because we can make machines to perform that maths easily? Or that some people who use the machines don't understand them? If so, then arithmetic is not maths, because a lot of people use calculators, and don't know how to divide numbers without one.
Re:It's possible that certain types of patents are (Score:3, Insightful)
I think it is to do with the way things are taught : I strongly believe CS needs to be taught both top down and bottom up at the same time. All too often an approach known as "Java is all the world, and all the world is Java" is used in preference to showing people everything from AND gates to dependent type systems. Multiple passes through all these layers are needed too. But then unis would need to chuck out 75% of people in the first year...
Re:Not quite - bis (Score:1, Insightful)
Microsoft desperatly need to patent DRM before they ship Longhorn.
A petented DRM with support in hardware will be the death of everything else...
Re:Next: the US (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that, as Douglas Adams put it (paraphrased), the people who would want to take positions of power are precisely the ones who should never be allowed to wield it. People who crave power will inherently become corrupt. The people who should be running the country are the ones who would rather do anything BUT run the country. Sure, their first few decisions will be bad because they'll hold a grudge towards the system, but after they get to a certain point, they'll start to tolerate it and will feel duty-bound to do the best job they can for the good of the people. Then, after a period, they will begin to enjoy it. At this point, they should be removed as quickly as possible, as no good can come of this. :-D
European bureaucrats just won't learn... (Score:2, Insightful)
First off, I'm a big fan of Europe. I think getting the continent on the same basic human rights, and in a good trade zone, are all good things. I even like the euro (speaking as a Brit, we've yet to decide as a country). But I can't stand the behind-closed-doors, elitist attitude of the Commission and the European Central Bank.
"Patents will continue to be handled by national patent offices ... as before, which means different interpretations as to what is patentable, without any judiciary control by the European Court of Justice," said EU External Relations Commissioner Benita Ferrero-Waldner, representing the EU head office at the vote.
At least the way I read it, the guy is saying that it was a bad decision, and if only those poor ignorant elected representatives had made the right choice and rubber stamped what the bureaucrats asked them to, everything could be a lot better under superior, central control with limited accountability. Just like the recent votes on the constitution, the idea that just maybe the "elite" are fucking up big time and need to get back in touch with what their citizens want simply doesn't seem to occur to them.
Pisses me off big time, I tell you. I want a Europe for all the people, not a bunch of wannabes who often seem to view the European project as a more acceptable alternative to war as a method to conquer, rather than a democratic opportunity.
Sorry, I'm ranting here. Congrats to all those that made our views heard. Yes, the pro-patent lobby also voted against the bill out of fear of the amendments, but those amendments may never have been there in the first place without the anti-software patent people doing their thing.
Re:The EU Rocks! (Score:3, Insightful)
No it isn't. Yes there is some truth there, but quite a few exaggerations and obmissions, too.
I doubt that the US "... murdered more humans in a 50 year period than anyone else before ..." - WW2 cost roughly 50 million lives.
And while the US-Americans could certainly do with taking some responsibility for the actions of their government and look honestly at the crimes which were commited and mistakes which were made, other countries should do the very same.
The US might be the biggest polluter, but the EU and Canada are not that far behind. The US is not the only country selling military technology to corrupt dictatorships and propping up criminal regimes. The US is not the only country who stands by when genocide occurs in Dafur or Rwanda. It's pathetic that the US refuses to do anything about global warming, but the little the rest of us does about it is pathetic, too.
A hope for the future of software! (Score:3, Insightful)
I produce roughly 20000-25000 lines of code every 4-5 months, and I hate the thought that I can be accused of stealing someone elses idea every time I write 10-20 lines code - in fact it insults me. Lets hope europe will some day move to illigalize software patent on a national level. I want fredom to develop thank you! Not this thing the pro-patent politicians call "protection". It only protects big companies with big patentportfolios from having to compete by way of building the best products.
Re:RTFD (Score:3, Insightful)
When you use harmonization as your reason to argue for a point, you cause me to suspect the quality of the point for which you are arguing.
For some purposes, it's nice to have uniform rules, but uniform bad rules are worse than a patchwork of rules. With a patchwork you can find the place that you consider optimum, and operate from there.
OTOH, centralized control is an inherrent evil. Not a pure evil, as some good can come out of it, but it is nearly inevitable that, over time, more evil than good will result. This is because a centralized point of control is a place available for someone who values power over most other things to sieze control. It will happen. It will almost always happen within three changes of administration (sometimes more quickly, occasionally more slowly). At that point the rules will be changed to increase the amount of control adhereing to the central point beyond the optimal point, and more closely towards total. Succeeding administrations will only increase this tendency, whether they themselves are intentionally malign or not. (When did a government EVER vote to decrease it's power except in the face of overwhelming threat, personally, to the leaders of the government? [And not usually even then.]) For that matter, when did the general manager of a company disperse his authority? (Hint: This has happened. More than once, and often with favorable results. But it's quite rare.)
Note: I'm talking about tendencies here, and statistical trends. But they are VERY strong tendencies, and very solid trends. Still, fluctuations DO happen.
Re:Doesn't that make the patents toothless? (Score:3, Insightful)
No [ssrn.com]