Software patents: funny how it’s only big business that likes it
My Independent article this week is on how software patents are being railroaded through the European Parliament, in a way that’s underhand and has the terrible smell of Machiavellian dealings all through it.
First, a Groklaw posting pointing to a Danish newspaper article suggesting Bill Gates threatened Denmark with the loss of Navision if it didn’t push software patents.
Second, a ZDNet leader which observes:
This is a triumph of bureaucracy over democracy. It’s said of newspapers that you only know how bad they are when you read what they say about something you know; this affair has highlighted the mandarin mechanisms of Europe at their baleful worst. The killer argument that won the day for software patents? “We are adopting the position for institutional reasons so as not to create a precedent which might have a consequence of creating future delays in other processes.”
Third, Wendy Grossman’s article for Wired which sets out who stands where, in a plain non-contentious manner. (Must have been hard to write :-))
Fourth: the nosoftwarepatents site, which has plenty of explanation and/or links of how software patenting leads to less secure, more expensive software. How peculiar then that Microsoft should back it - we all know they want us to have cheaper, more secure products.
Why do I think software patents are bad? First because they’re unnecessary - all the required protections exist through copyright law, which is the one that is applied when you tear off the shrinkwrap (and can anyone tell me of any products which are protected by both patent *and* copyright law?); and second because they’re used, in general, by the larger companies against the smaller one, to stifle competition. In the cases where small companies sue larger ones, such as Burst suing Microsoft, the aim is generally to ride the coattails of a successful technology.
And as a sideline, it’s interesting how many businesses find plain old copyright law, as described in the GPL, somehow too hard to comply with. Here’s a story about a GPL developer who has served writs on a number of companies, and a link to his site - GPL-violations.org.
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March 23rd, 2005 at 1:31 pm
Very good article Charles. Glad to see you are another journalist who ‘gets it’. I think nearly all technology journos now understand why software patents are just plain wrong. Unfortunately we have a lot of MEPs who remain to be convinced, especially in the UK, which remains pretty-much the most pro-swpat country in Europe so far as I can tell (maybe Finland is worse). The UK conservatives and Labour are all saying “obviously patents on software per se are bad, and we want open source to flourish, but we want people to be able to patent software that makes a ‘technical contribution’”. Anyone who has loked at this in any detail finds that a technical contribution results from the software doing almost anything useful, which results in any software being patantable if the application is written in the right way.
MEPs need to be shown the ridiculous patents that are already being granted in the UK e.g: http://wiki.ffii.org/?UkHorrorGalleryEn
and made to understand that the proposed Directive allows this sort of rubbish to continue to be granted, and that’s bad for all the reasons Charles so eloquently explained.
March 23rd, 2005 at 3:17 pm
I think the problem is that everyone sounds so reasonable when you talk to them. :)
wg
March 23rd, 2005 at 3:34 pm
Microsoft Behind EU Software Patents?
Further to John Naughton below, today’s Independent Charles Arthur notes that the European Council’s drive to introduce software patents in the EU, and in doing so restrict the threat of Open Source, may have been prompted by Microsoft, and specifically
March 23rd, 2005 at 9:29 pm
I wrote to all my MEPs and got back a reply from the conservative that was so reasonable that I still don’t know what it meant …
March 24th, 2005 at 1:14 am
Wendy Grossman’s article is highly contentious - at least the first sentence is. As one of the many critics of the proposed Directive who have pointed out how damaging it will be to SMEs in Europe, it is galling to be described as having denounced it as “too business-friendly”. As for Cringely’s comments about the Burst.com patents - “…remember that Burst spent 21 years and more than $50 million developing their technology. They did it the hard way, by being smart and following the rules, and deserve to benefit from their hard work and brainpower” - having just read the broad and trivial claims in the patents concerned I’d say that if it did take them 21 years of hard work and brainpower it must have been because it wasn’t easy for them to operate their computer keyboards with their hooves.
It was good to see your article in the Independent but if discussion of this enormously important issue remains relegated to the business and technology sections of the papers, I doubt we are going to win. It cannot be all that often that vested interests cause UK Government departments to lie to the public, that profoundly far-reaching legislation is drafted deliberately to obscure it’s intent, that the bulk of domestic economic interests are ignored for the convenience of a few, mostly foreign corporations, that European politicians risk their careers by deceiving their Parliaments and even their own Parties or that the rights and freedoms of individuals and organisations are savagely infringed and curtailed by a gratuitous perversion of the patent system.
Perhaps the newspapers just want us all to be happy? ;-)
March 24th, 2005 at 1:43 pm
MEPs Respond
I’ve had two responses to my own note of concern reference the Euro Software Patent issues below.
March 24th, 2005 at 11:39 pm
To Andrew Brown and the author of comment 6: the responses you have received from the Tory MEPs are stock replies, drafted by pro-swpat lobbyists. I tried to reply to the comment 6 author’s blog but fell afoul of the aggressive filtering:
“This is the standard response (identical to others I have seen) that most Tories appear to be sending now. It seems to reflect the Tory official position and is just a collection of easily refutable untruths underpinned by the classic argumentum ad ignorantiam of the patent extremists and was almost certainly drafted with the assistance of the pro-software patent lobby. That is actually a good sign because MEPs are not sheep and there is a chance that Dr. Tannock would respond well to a follow up that points out the appallingly weak case of the pro-software patent lobby and it’s reliance on fallacy and disinformation.
One can’t really blame individual MEPs for relying on the party line and sending stock replies: it *is* a complex issue and it is not even immediately apparent to most people just how profoundly important it is”.
Please feel free to email me (xc.hta.enobflow@luap) if you wish to pursue the matter (it really isn’t entirely hopeless) and need some ammunition :-)
March 30th, 2005 at 5:28 pm
I have sent a email letter to my (South East) MEPS and got an immediate answer from Dr Caroline Lucas of the Greens. They are fully aware of the issues and are campaigning against the proposals.
I think it’s worth sharing a section from her standard reply…
”
I believe that the tactics used by the Council to push through
their version of the directive were an example of the EU at its
worst. Fortunately the legislative procedure being used for this
directive is co-decision. This means that the European Parliament
will be consulted on the directive again when the Council’s version
(the “Common Position”) returns to the Parliament for the second
reading. Please be assured that I, and my Green MEP colleagues,
We will do all we can to re-write the text with the necessary proposals and
amendments from the Parliament’s first reading, with the ultimate aim of
limiting patentability as far as possible. In the event that no agreement
can be reached between Council and Parliament - which is unfortunately
what I expect to happen - it is possible that the proposal may even go to
a third reading under the so-called conciliation procedure. Alternatively
if the Parliament feels that there is really no way of improving the text
of the Common Position, it could reject it outright.
”
Ian