taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

Patents: So the Conference of Presidents has ratified the JURI decision to throw out the flawed software patents directive text. Phew! That’s a lot more pressure on the European Commission. Charlie McCreevy could still carry on his attempt to steamroller European democracy on this one, but it looks likely that he wouldn’t get away with it now — possibly facing sanctions as a result.

Found in a Slashdot comment — an amazing quote from Michel Rocard (former French Prime Minister, now European Deputy), recounting a meeting with Microsoft representatives on the software-patent issue:

“We never could (speak) a common language with the companies representatives we met - in particular those from Microsoft. Speaking about (the free circulation of ideas), free access to knowledge, was like speaking chinese to them. In their way of thinking, everything that is not usable for immediate profit ceases to be an engine of growth. They don’t seem to be able to understand that an invention which is a pure spirit creation (sic) can’t be patented. It’s simply terrifying. Many of us, at the Parliament, agree to say that they never have know such a pressure and such a verbal violence during their parliamentary work. It is a huge case.”

In addition, he takes aim at the Irish Presidency’s tactics:

“To adopt it formally, there is an expeditious procedure — the (A-item) at the Council of Ministers, where the it is adopted without discussion. The Irish and Dutch presidencies attempted this tactic three times, twice at meetings of the (Fisheries Council)! This is simply scandalous.”

Blimey, he’s really pissed off. Great! Go Rocard! ;)

See here for the original interview (in French), and here for a bad Babelfish translation.

In happier news — take a look at some pictures from the presentation of 30,000 verified signatures (and flowers!) from people around the world, thanking the Polish Government for their repeated stands against the flawed directive in December.

Tags: conference, council, decision, directive, european, microsoft, patents, phew, pressure, software, text

Patents: FFII are reporting that ‘the Legal Affairs Committee of the European Parliament (JURI) has decided with a large majority to ask the Commission for a renewed referral of the software patents directive. With only two or three votes against and one abstention, the resolution had overwhelming support from the committee, and all-party backing.’

Michel Rocard MEP gave a very strong speech at the meeting with the Commissioner. Apart from noting several “inelegancies” by the Commission, such as not taking into account any of the Parliament’s substantive amendments in its recommendation to the Council, he also took issue with the Dutch and German governments ignoring their respective parliaments, the Irish Presidency’s sponsorship by Microsoft and the attempted ratifications of the political (dis)agreement at several fishery Council meetings.

He mentioned that at a meeting with the Polish government, the industry players confirmed that the Council text allowed pure software patents, and wondered how the Commission could continue claiming the reverse. He was also curious about how the Commission’s perfectly tautological definition of the concept “technical” could help in any way to distinguish between what is patentable and what is not. Despite his own abstention when voting on the restart later that day, the fact that almost everyone else supported it is probably his personal achievement.

The Commissioner made clear that “any agreement will need to strike a fair balance between different interests”, and that “a constructive dialogue between the Council and Parliament will be vital for an agreement”. He does have the option to deny a new first reading. But given the strength of feeling in the Parliament and the concerns of so many member states in the Council, the Parliament request looks like the best way to achieve a clean way forward for this Directive that everyone has been looking for.

This is good news for the anti-swpat side. Nul points for the Irish Commissioner, Charlie McCreevy, who ‘had in the morning assured the JURI Committee that the Council would finally adopt its beleaguered Common Position text. He announced that “the Luxembourg Presidency has now received written assurances concerning the re-instatement of this issue as an A point at a forthcoming Council”. Given that A points are to be adopted without discussion, this left no possibilities for renewed negotiations in the Council’.

Tags: abstention, agreement, commission, committee, council, everyone, meeting, parliament, patents, software, way

Patents: This is really absurd — according to this ZDNet UK article, it now looks like the EU Council is considering railroading the EU software patent directive through, by hiding it as an ‘A-item’ in a Fisheries Council Meeting the week before xmas:

Laura Creighton, the vice-president of the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), is concerned that the EU Council could be contemplating passing the directive without discussion in an unrelated meeting.

‘Before today it was possible for generous people to look charitably at this text (the proposed patent directive) as an example of a tragic mistake, not malice,’ said Creighton in a statement on the FFII Web site. ‘But not with this last-minute manoeuvring.’

‘Only the most committed opponent to the democratic process would believe that the proper response to the widespread consensus that there is something profoundly wrong with the Council’s text is to race it through with an A-item approval the week before Christmas in a Fisheries Council Meeting. The bad smell coming from Brussels has nothing to do with the fish.’

Reportedly, A-items are dealt with by asking the assembled councillors if they have any objections to any of the outstanding items. They’re not listed in detail at the meeting, so this way the directive can be passed in what is effectively a submarine (boom boom!) manner.

Related: Alan Cox has not been invited to the UK Patents office’s public meeting on software patents tomorrow.

In a Talkback to ZDNet UK’s earlier story highlighting the issue, Cox wrote: ‘I too was mysteriously overlooked despite having written to my MP and received an answer.’ …. Cox, who has previously been invited to speak on software patents at the EU, said the Patent Office apparently fears ‘every word I have to say about their plans’. He went on to add: ‘Unfortunately with all the underhand game playing both in the EU council of ministers and in UK government and patent circles it isn’t the slightest surprise.’

Also related: Jason Schultz (EFF) on the Commerce One web-services patent auction last week:

Here, the patents at issue were less valuable to companies that actually produce Web services products than they were to firms that produce nothing but lawsuits and licensing threats. In other words, patents like these have become worth more as weapons than as protections for companies competing in the marketplace.

Many have compared these new patent licensing firms to terrorists, and in some ways, the analogy is apt. When the Soviet Union collapsed, one of the biggest worries was that rogue military personnel might sell off one or more of the USSR’s nuclear missiles to a terrorist group. Securing those weapons became a top priority. The reason was fear – fear that the terrorists, who had little to nothing at stake in terms of world peace and national stability, would use the missiles to extort or manipulate the world political climate. Unlike the United States or China, which could be retaliated against and which had a stake in stability, terrorists were essentially immune from attack, and thrived on instability.

With the patents of bankrupt dot-coms, the dynamics are similar. Rogue licensing firms buy up these patents and then threaten legitimate innovators and producers. They have no products on which a countersuit can be based and no interest in stable marketplaces, competition or consumer benefit. Their only interest is in the bottom line.

While profit itself is often a worthy objective, it is not always synonymous with innovation. Every dollar a tech company pays to patent lawyers or licensing firms is one less dollar available for R&D or new hires. Thus, many companies that offer new products end up paying a ‘tax’ on innovation instead of receiving a reward. When this happens, it’s a signal that the patent system is broken. Forcing companies to pay lawyers instead of creating jobs and new products is the wrong direction for our economy to be headed and not the result our patent system should be promoting.

Tags: council, cox, directive, ffii, item, meeting, patent, patents, software, text, week

Patents: Now that the summer break is over, software patents are back on the EU’s agenda. The FFII (via EDRI-gram) reports

On 24 September 2004, the European Council will probably meet to rubber-stamp the ‘political agreement’ achieved on 18 May 2004 on the highly controversial software patents directive (2002/0047 COM-COD).

According to the FFII the text was designed to mislead ministers about its real effects. ‘It consists of many sentences of the form or ’software is … unpatentable, unless … [condition, which, upon closer scrutiny, turns to be always true]‘.’ And, states FFII, ‘It can be said with certainty that only a minority of governments really agrees with what was negotiated, but several governments were misrepresented by their negotiators, who broke intra-ministerial agreements or even violated instructions from their superiors.’

More info:

• FFII Urgent call to National Governments and Parliaments (04.06.2004)
• FFII call for action against software patents (07.09.2004)
• FSF Europe open letter to EU presidency (06.09.2004)

Tags: agenda, break, call, council, edri-gram, european, ffii, patents, september, software, summer

Patents: According to Ciaran O’Riordan of IFSO, one key aspect of the EU Council’s meeting on the software patent legalisation proposal hinged on the use of the phrase ‘as such’, to effectively sneak a loophole past the Council members:

I recommend that everyone listen to the recordings of the Council’s meeting. Transcripts are also linked from there, but the tone of voice etc. is interesting.

Anyway, basically, the people in the room didn’t understand the implications of the text (that’s our fault).

Bolkenstein added an amendment: “computer programs will not be patentable as such” - this (rightly) fooled most people into thinking that software would not be patentable. Really, it just means you can’t patent software as software, you have to patent “software running on a computer”. I think the rejected part of the German amendment would have closed this loophole. …..

Anyway, the point is that the Council members were on our side, we just hadn’t told them precisely what we want …. We told them “no to software patents”, and they think they’ve done that. We should have said “no to ‘as such”‘, and similar textual lobbying rather then implication lobbying.

Tags: amendment, aspect, computer, council, ifso, legalisation, loophole, meeting, patent, patents, software

Patents: The Irish EU Presidency keeps on rolling.

FFII notes that ‘this Wednesday, the Irish Presidency managed to secure a qualified majority for a counter-proposal to the software patents directive, with only a few countries - including Belgium and Germany - showing resistance. (This ‘compromise’ is the most pro-patent text yet,) discarding all the amendments from the European 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. In a remarkable sign of unity in times of imminent elections, members of the European Parliament from all groups across the political spectrum are condemning this blatant disrespect for democracy in Europe.’

Some quotes from MEPs about this behaviour:

• Daniel Cohn-Bendit, chairman of the Greens/EFA Group: ‘The national patent officials in the Council do not want “harmonisation” or “clarification”. They merely want to secure the interests of the patent establishment. If they don’t get what they want, they simply bury the directive project and try to find other ways to get around the existing law.’
• Anne Van Lancker, a Belgian MEP of the Socialist group: ‘the current Council proposal was written behind closed doors by patent office administrators.’
• Piia-Noora Kauppi, Finnish MEP of the European People’s Party: ‘the Council is not taking the will of Europe’s elected legislators into account.’
• Pernille Frahm, Danish member and Vice-Chairwoman of the GUE/NGL group: ‘The patent administrators in the Commission and Council are abusing the legislative process of the EU.’
• Bent Hindrup Andersen (MEP, DK, EDD): ‘The approach of the Commission and Council in this directive is shocking. They are making full use of all the possibilities of evading democracy that the current Community Law provides.’
• Johanna Boogerd-Quaak (MEP, NL, ELDR): ‘the Irish Presidency has buckled under the interests of American Companies. A handful of big American Companies may actually profit from software patents, but it is a very bad deal for innovation in European SMEs. Additionally, the Council is showing contempt for parliamentary democracy. We must make sure that after the elections there will again be a majority in the European Parliament that is willing to show its teeth.’

Amazingly, the Council proposal documents aren’t even being released to the public, ‘due to the sensitive nature of the negotiations and the absence of an overriding public interest’; the FFII got hold of them via a leak.

There’s still a chance that this can be reversed; this still needs to be confirmed at the Competitiveness Council of Ministers on 17-18 May. This isn’t a dead cert just yet. As a result, FFII are proposing more demonstrations and another ‘net strike’.

It’s unclear whether writing to anyone will make a difference, at least for people in Ireland, however; everything I’ve read seems to indicate that our representatives on the EU Competitivity Council are not on our side.

Specifically, the only names I can find regarding this Council are Mary Harney, pro-business, anti-regulation right-wing leader of the Progressive Democrats and ‘President-in-Office’ of this committee; and the staff of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment’s Intellectual Property Unit.

(Of course, Harney at least can always be voted out at the next elections, and I’d strongly suggest anyone working in the field bear that in mind if this gets passed!)

Tags: commission, council, directive, group, irish, mep, patent, patentability, patents, presidency, proposal

Patents: Disastrous for European software developers, that is.

It looks like Ireland’s EU Council Presidency is pushing through some nasty stuff on behalf of the European Patent Office. FFII says:

On all points where substantial controversy exists, the Council Working Party has taken the most hardline pro-patent view of all parties. They make patentability hinge on the word ‘technical’ and yet refuse to explain what that word means. They have refused the interoperability exemption which even the Legal Affairs Committee had accepted. They have rejected the freedom of publication. They are insisting on making programs directly claimable, something which even Arlene McCarthy and the Commission did not advocate.

Nokia’s Patent Department is leading the PR push:

The (Nokia call-for-support) letter calls on ministers to drop their objections, and to support a draft text issued by the Irish Presidency on March 17th: ‘All of Europe’s innovators, including individual inventors, small and medium size enterprises (SMEs), as well as large multinational companies, require patents to protect their inventions, provide incentives to undertake research and development in Europe, and to promote licensing and technology transfer’, claims the letter.

‘Nokia doesn’t seem to be counting Opera among the European innovators’, comments Håkon Wium Lie, CTO of Opera Software Inc, an innovation leader in the web browser market and producer of much of the software used in Nokia’s mobile phones.

Note that it’s the Patent Department of Nokia, not necessarily Nokia’s top brass, pushing this — here’s a relevant anecdote from FFII:

The patent officials never see the CEOs themselves, and when they appear in public, their thinking on patent matters may surprise the audience. Last week Airbus CEO Peter Kleinschmidt was invited as a pro-patent speaker to a panel in Paris but then, during his speech, congratulated his co-panelist Michel Rocard for his important contributions to containing the expansion of the patent system, which, as he described in detail, was slowing down innovation at Airbus.

(The economic studies and the US’ Federal Trade Commission both concur, incidentally. But it’s pretty unlikely a patent lawyer will say the same thing in public ;)

On the other side, 15 MEPs have signed their own Call For Action which points out that ‘patent professionals in various governments and organisations are now trying to use the EU Council of Ministers in order to sidestep parliamentary democracy in the European Union’ and urges the Council to ‘refrain from any counter-proposals to the European Parliament’s version of the draft, unless such counter-proposals have been explicitely endorsed by a majority decision of the member’s national parliament’.

Let’s see if Ireland’s presidency will do it the democratic way, or in a back-room deal, over all our heads…

Tags: council, department, ffii, letter, nokia, opera, patent, patents, presidency, software, word

Patents: The FFII are suggesting a 10-day online ‘net strike’ to protest against the ongoing attempts to legalise software patenting in Europe.

The Commission and the Irish EU Council Presidency are pushing for unlimited patentability of software, heavily lobbied by multinationals and patent lawyers. They are ignoring the democratically voted decision of the European Parliament from 24 September 2003, which has the support of more than 300,000 citizens, 2,000,000 SMEs and dozens of economists and scientists.

As a result, I’m putting up a protest front page on these sites:

• this weblog
• my personal home page
• My software sites: EtText, WebMake, Sitescooper, Sitescooper Daily Scoops

If you support the actions of FFII, please join in, or even attend the in-person demonstration in Brussels! We need to make it clear that the small software developers of Europe do not support these undemocratic actions.

And finally, shame on the Irish EU Council presidency for supporting the EPO hook, line and sinker. Thanks, and I know who I’ll be voting for in future…

Tags: council, day, ffii, irish, online, page, patents, presidency, sitescooper, software, strike

Patents: FFII: Conferences and ‘Patent Riots’ in Brussels 2004-04-14
: ‘The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) calls on its 50.000 European supporters and on 300.000 petition signatories, including more than 2000 CEOs of European software companies, to take to the streets in Brussels on April 14 and in national capitals around 1st of May, and to temporarily block access to their websites, in protest against new moves by the EU Council and Commission to legalise patents on computerised calculation rules and business methods’.

Last year, the European Parliament voted to exclude software and business methods from patentability. Now, it appears the EU Council is secretly planning to push that through regardless — so FFII are planning another round of protest for 2004-04-14.

In other news — the European Patent Office and other pro-patent bodies have always insisted that the WTO Trade-Related Intellectual Property (TRIPS) treaty required that software be patentable. However, this poster thinks not:

Article 10 of said treaty clearly states: a.. ‘Computer programs, whether in source or object code, shall be protected as literary works under the Berne Convention (1971).’

This is the strange thing you see, the statement doesn’t seem to mean that much on first glance. It is only when reading it closely that one realises that it does not simply say that ‘computer programs are automatically copyrighted under the Berne Convention’, it specifies they ’shall be protected as literary works’.

Literary works cannot be patented because they are not inventions. Indeed if literary works could be patented one would have to concede that books, screenplays, and music could be patented as well although according to my research there is no provision for this in law. We would also have to apply patent laws to these areas since we are not allowed, apparently under article 5 to restrict on the basis of the field of technology.

On reflection, it’s actually a very interesting comparison. Like literary works, it’s not the idea of what software does (the plot summary) that makes it valuable, it’s all the fiddly details of its implementation (the full story). Hmm! Maybe TRIPS got that right after all…

Tags: article, business, computer, council, european, ffii, patent, patents, protest, software, treaty

Great news from the European Parliament — the good amendments have been passed and it looks a lot better. James Heald of FFII is quoted as saying ‘the directive text as amended by the European Parliament clearly excludes software patents. It hangs together incredibly cohesively.’

Congratulations to our MEPs who grasped the highly technical nuances of the issue, and voted the right way, and to the groups who advised them so well. No congrats to me who went on holidays just before this vote. ;)

Now, all that remains is to ensure that the Council of Ministers also do the right thing; unfortunately FFII note that ‘in the past, the Council of Ministers has left patent policy decisions to its patent policy working party, which consists of patent law experts who are also sitting on the administrative council of the European Patent Office (EPO). This group has been one of the most determined promoters of unlimited patentability, including program claims, in Europe.’ Not encouraging.

Meta: still catching up and getting through the jetlag…

Tags: council, directive, european, ffii, lot, ministers, news, parliament, patent, policy

Well, despite the covert bugging of the European Council offices of 3 major EU delegations, the apparatus of some states, at least, is bringing a smile to my face. The German federal secret service, the Bundesnachrichendienstes (BND), has just published Topf Secret, their official cookbook. Really. The Guardian notes:

The book consists of recipes sent in from around the world by German spies in the field. Thus, there are two recipes from Iraq, several from central Africa, the Philippines and Scotland.

Again, more questions than answers. The Germans have spies in Scotland? Do they really eat haggis? (’Attention: fill only 2/3 of the stomach since the oat flour will expand. If the stomach is too full it can explode while cooking!’) Do the two recipes from Iraq - for fattousch and tabouleh - have to be so boring (use only crunchy lettuce leaves for the fattousch)? Why are there German agents in Iraq? What are they doing in the US as well, and do they like that nation’s recipe for pumpkin pie?

Tags: apparatus, bugging, bundesnachrichendienstes, council, european, face, fattousch, service, smile, stomach

According to the Minister for Communications, Marine and Natural Resources, Mr. D. Ahern, Ireland will “transpose into Irish law the requirements of European Parliament and Council Directive 2002/58/EC concerning the processing of personal data and the protection of privacy in the electronic communications sector” before the end of 2003.

It will be nice to be able to point to the law, eventually — for what that’s worth. Since most spammers are USian, relaying via other countries, actually acting on the law will not be quite so simple. But it will be an improvement.

Tags: communications, council, directive, european, law, marine, minister, natural, parliament, transpose