EU software patents.

[mobrien_12]

It's not looking good.  Not only does it look like software patents are going to be a reality in Europe, but that they are going to be even more onerous and ridiculous than they are in the USA.

That's bad.

Read more at GrokLaw.

 

quote:Excerpt from the article
 "The EU Council of Ministers seems determined to prove that the EU is a democracy only on paper. This Wednesday, the Irish Presidency has managed to secure a qualified majority for a counter-proposal on the software patents directive, with only a few countries - including Belgium and Germany - showing resistance. The new text proposes to discard all the amendments from the European Parliament which would limit patentability. Instead the lax language of the original Commission proposal is to be reinstated in its entirety, with direct patentability of program text fragments added as icing on the cake. The proposal is now scheduled to be confirmed without discussion at a meeting of ministers on 17-18 May, unless one of the Member States changes its vote."

[ May 08, 2004: Message edited by: M. O'Brien ]

[ May 08, 2004: Message edited by: M. O'Brien ]

[KernelPanic]

Can't describe how angry I am, it's too late to do anything.

[insomnia]

If you haven't done this already:
Submit your website:

http://demo.ffii.org/inserturl.php

[Calum]

i wish i had time to be active in all this :-(

i just received this from mandrakesoft, who are worried about the new EU patents legislation which is imminent (being a French company and all):

 

quote:
Flash: EU Software Patent Legislation: a real threat for Linux and
Open
Source

Mandrakesoft would like to alert all users and the software community
at
large about a recent clandestine attack by proprietary interest
through
covert adoption of EU Software Patent Legislation.

In direct contravention of the recent vote by the European Parliament
to
curtail Software Patents, the Irish Presidency of the European Union
has
surreptitiously reinstated unlimited software patent language into the
text of a statement to be adopted by the European Council of Ministers
on Monday May, 17th, without further debate!

The new text, if adopted, will extend Software Patents to every piece
of
software, including computer programs, data structures, and process
descriptions.  This will directly harm most software firms and all
Open
Source projects unable to pay patent licensing tribute, and amounts to
an appropriation of the public domain by proprietary interests.  A
direct beneficiary will be a new class of pure patent companies
without
any real business or contribution to employment, which will use the
threat of litigation to extort payments.
Of note is that a sponsor of the Irish Presidency is Microsoft,
currently building a large patent portfolio.  If the Software Patent
text is adopted, Microsoft may use this patent portfolio against Linux
and other Open Source projects.

Mandrakesoft would like to forewarn and mobilize its users and the
software community about the very real threat of such a law.  Please
contact the media, your political representatives, and your
government,
and urge them to vote against unlimited Software Patents and to revert
to the previous European Parliament position.

For further information please see the following links:
http://swpat.ffii.org/journal/04/cons0507/index.en.html

http://kwiki.ffii.org/SwpatcninoEn

   Mandrakesoft Online Team.

[Calum]

well from the overwhelming response i can tell you're all really interested in this, but it's now crunch time, here's what mandrakesoft sent me today...

Flash: Software patents - fresh news and call for action

As a follow-up to our latest flash regarding the upcoming decision of
the European Council to legalize software patentability in Europe,
here are some fresh news and information on what you can do to help.

If nothing changes, tomorrow, Tuesday May 18, the European Council,
that is, the European body which represents all the governments of the
European Union, will vote in favor of a directive that will legalize
software patents in Europe. Last September, faced with a similar
choice, the European Parliament voted major amendments to the
directive text drafted by the European Commission, actually rejecting
software patentability. However, the Council, ignoring all of these
amendments, is going to vote in favor of a text that is even worse
than the initial version of the Commission.

Why can the Council take a decision which will be so harmful to the
European software industry? Unlike the Parliament, which is a place
open to the public, where Members of the European Parliament have
had time to study the proposal and hear many positions on the issue
in order to take a well-thought decision, the Council is a closed
body where, due to the alledged complexity of the subject,
representatives of the governments have handed out the file to
committees of experts.

These experts, who re-drafted the text and wrote position papers on
why to vote it, are in fact mostly representatives from the national
patent offices, backed by the heads of the legal departments of some
big industrial companies, all of whom have a common interest: more
patents mean more power for them, irrespective of the harm that will
be done to the economy at large, and even to their own companies. In
the name of "the Industry" and of "innovation",
they manipulated the
political decision-makers to make them believe that the new text did
not allow to patent pure software, that it was a good compromise
between
the Commission and Parliament texts, and that not all of the
parliamentary amendments could be kept because some of them were
illegal with respect to international treaties such as TRIPS. All of
this is plain lie.

In fact, if voted, the text of the Council would lead to a situation
where big companies with large patent portfolios use these to lock
their respective markets and prevent competition from innovative SMEs,
and where "intellectual property" companies that do not
create any
software use their own patent portfolios to collect license fee rents
from everybody. This is the situation which is happening in the US,
putting at risk its successful software industry. This is what may
just happen in Europe in a few months.

However, it is not too late. Because of growing pressure from computer
professionals and from the public, and because they get more and more
feed-back from the media, political decision-makers begin to get aware
of the issues, and to have doubts about the sincerity of the patent
lobby. In some countries, they have taken the file back from the
patent offices
http://lwn.net/Articles/85379/
http://kwiki.ffii.org/?SwpatcninoEn
and some countries of the Council have just decided to switch from a
voting procedure without debate to a voting procedure with debate,
as the text gets less and less consensus among the members of the
European Union.

You can convince even more of them to reject software patentability.
In order to do that, please take some time to read about the issues
at stake, and spread the information across your friends and business
contacts, the press, your members of the parliament and your
government.
It is essential that elected policy makers get back into command of
the
situation and do not leave the patent offices decide alone.

Here are some texts which can help you to present the issues to the
media and to convince policy-makers of all countries of the European
Union.

A very readable analysis by Fran

[KernelPanic]

I've been reading around and I fel more sick every time.
I don't have the free time to be active in fighting this but I may get a letter written just to make my concerns known. (or ignored - most likely)

[insomnia]

If this doesn't stop, we might all end up with to much time...    

This is really raising my blood pressure...  :mad:

[zao]

The way I see software patents: robbery because that will only benefit the corporation, not the people.