taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

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: oh, this is painfully ironic.

patents4innovation.org is a PR site set up by EICTA, a consortium of several pro-software-patent multinational companies, to put some PR money into lobbying for the legalisation of swpats in the EU. I’ve mentioned it before in the context of another boo-boo. Well, here’s the next one.

According to FFII, they recently took a Creative-Commons-licensed article from another website, and:

• republished it without the required attribution to the author
• translated it, creating a ‘derived work’, against the terms of the license
• and then failed to notify readers of the licensing terms, as required

In other words, they managed to infringe the terms of its copyright-based licensing in multiple clauses.

No wonder they claim that patents are required to protect people’s inventions. It seems they just don’t understand how copyright-based licensing works ;)

(The article’s been taken down from the p4i site, but not before the boo-boo was spotted by an eagle-eyed FFII’er.)

Tags: article, consortium, eicta, ffii, innovation, legalisation, licensing, money, org, patents, site

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

Photos: the view out to sea from Seal Beach, just south of LA. (duh. thanks Ben, I’d b0rked the link earlier.)

Patents: via the FFII Kwiki, here’s 2087 Microsoft USPTO software patents viewed roughly by subject matter. The ‘Web’ selection is particularly interesting.

Terror: The Atlantic: All you need is love — how the terrorists stopped terrorism. Amazing — marry them off!

Tourism: Pictures from Bangkok’s new ‘Sky Bar’ — open-air dining, 63 floors up, with no walls apart from 1.5-metre-high glass.

Tags: ben, duh, ffii, kwiki, link, microsoft, patents, photos, sea, uspto, view

Politics: FFII reports that the ‘IPR Enforcement Directive’, the law proposed to deal with ‘IPR infringement’ by the wife of the CEO of Vivendi Universal, has just been approved by the EU Council.

Another glorious moment of digital cluelessness by the Irish presidency. But then, it had already been passed by the parliament. Reminder: that page lists the Irish MEPs and how they voted on a key amendment, which would have inserted safeguards so that ’surprise raids … in the middle of the night by private security firms, on the flimsiest evidence’ would not be possible.

It’s now done in Europe. Next step is to deal with it when the member state governments implement it (which has to happen by June 2006).

Tags: ceo, directive, enforcement, ffii, infringement, ipr, law, politics, the, vivendi, wife

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

Ireland: Now that the IP Enforcement directive has passed, Irish readers might be interested to find out how their MEPs voted on it.

First off, the good ones:

• PATRICIA MCKENNA - GREEN PARTY MEP (DUBLIN) since 1994
• NUALA AHERN - GREEN PARTY MEP (LEINSTER) since 1994

Both of the Green MEPs voted along party lines on a key amendment, amendment 54, which would have limited enforcement to commercial-scale counterfeiting rather than individual infringement.

But on the other side, we have these, who voted for applicability of the directive to all ‘IPR’, according to FFII. The hall of shame:

• JOE McCARTIN - FINE GAEL MEP (CONNACHT/ULSTER) since 1979
• JOHN CUSHNAHAN - FINE GAEL MEP (MUNSTER) since 1989
• DANA ROSEMARY SCALLON - INDEPENDENT MEP (CONNACHT/ULSTER) since 1999
• NIALL ANDREWS - FIANNA FAIL MEP (DUBLIN) since 1984
• GERARD COLLINS - FIANNA FAIL MEP (MUNSTER) since 1994
• JIM FITZSIMONS - FIANNA FAIL MEP (LEINSTER) since 1984
• LIAM HYLAND - FIANNA FAIL MEP (LEINSTER) since 1994

Unsurprising to see the conservative FFers (and Dana!) in there — but what do FG think they’re doing?

Considering that FFII read this as permitting ’surprise raids on teenagers in the middle of the night by private security firms on the flimsiest of evidence’, as passed, this is a ‘hall of shame’ issue.

The moral: vote Green!

Tags: amendment, directive, enforcement, fail, ffii, green, hall, ireland, mep, meps, party

Patents: While I was reading LWN’s excellent writeup on the results of the EuroParl patent vote, I came across this very worrying snippet:

Readers in the United States may be interested to know that the U.S. government has chimed in with opposition to article 6a, which states that patents can not be used to block interoperability.

Sure enough, it links to an FFII page noting

‘the US’ believes that conversion between patented file formats should generally not be allowed without a license, and therefore demands deletion of Art 6a.’

‘the US’ is in quotes because FFII reckon that evidence suggests that this is the US Mission’s IPR representatives forwarding the text direct from the US Patent Office, since the USPTO is an agency of the Dept of Commerce.

…. ‘It is part of a US Government ‘Action Plan’ to ‘promote international harmonisation of substantive patent law’ in order to ’strengthen the rights of American intellectual property holders by making it easier to obtain international protection for their inventions’. This plan has been promoted aggressively by top officials of the US Patent Office in international fora such as WIPO, WSIS and OECD as well as through bilateral negotiations.’

BTW, that is exactly the wording used in the USPTO’s 21st Century Strategic Plan paper. FFII go on to comment on their letter, including this note:

‘The US’ is propagating conventional wisdom such as ‘the more patents the more property, the more property the more innovation’, which is in sharp contrast to consensus of all serious scholars of software economics, as expressed in numerous studies conducted in the USA and in reports by the US Academy of Sciences.

Moreover, ‘the US’ has been ignoring the voice of its own software industry, which is, as shown by last year’s FTC hearings, characterised by ‘continued animosity against software patents’ and whose major players, including such companies as Adobe, Oracle and Autodesk, all opposed software patentability at the USPTO hearing of 1994. The same USPTO which is ghostwriting this paper in the name of ‘the US’ today proceded to legalise program claims shortly after the 1994 hearing, thereby completely ignoring the voice of the US software industry.

One comment on the LWN story notes: ‘as the United States is seeking to rewrite European law to their
agenda, what steps can European Citizens take to help turn the USPTO agenda around into something approaching the spirit of the US Constitution and those who wrote it?’

A good question.

Tags: ffii, government, lwn, office, patent, patents, plan, property, software, uspto, writeup

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

FFII have discovered that Amazon.com have received a patent from the EPO ‘which covers all computerised methods of automatically delivering a gift to a third party’. It seems to cover Amazon’s ‘One-Click’ ordering system, as well.

Wierd: Tiny town to reek of sex. Don’t get excited — it’s only moth pheromones. (via Peter Darben on the forteana list.)

Medical slang, including:

• ATS: Acute Thespian Syndrome
• Departure lounge — Geriatric ward
• DBI: Dirtbag index (calculated by the number of tattoos on the body multiplied by number of recent missing teeth, to estimate days without a bath)
• NFN: Normal for Norfolk
• Pumpkin positive: When you shine a penlight into the patient’s mouth and his brain is so small his whole head lights up
• PFO: Pissed, fell over
• Scepticaemia: What doctors develop with experience

And — finally! — an explanation for that ER term:

• Stat: Immediately, shortened from the Latin statim

Linux: GrokLaw on SCO and Sun’s Linux indemnification FUD. Well worth a read – especially the bit where Mr. GrokLaw finds an old SCO contract that does include indemnification terms. Indemnification, that is, with some pretty serious get-out clauses and stings in the tail.

Weather: Mont Blanc closed due to record heatwave. ‘This year, for the first time since its conquest in 1786, the heatwave has made western Europe’s highest peak too dangerous to climb. Mont Blanc is closed. The conditions have been so extreme, say glaciologists and climate experts, and the retreat of the Alps’ eternal snows and glaciers so pronounced, that the range — and its multi-billion-pound tourist industry — may never fully recover.’

Food: Cooking for the Mafia. ‘Conrad Gallagher was the highest flier in the gaudy firmament of New Ireland. A Michelin star at the age of 26, and a swank restaurant, called Peacock Alley’. Not too long afterwards, things had not gone so well — he was in the Brooklyn Detention Centre. Pretty terrifying article — a US jail is not one of the nicest places in the world…

Spam: The Howard Dean election campaign ran into a wrinkle last week — and pretty soon was apparently ‘joe-jobbed’. This one is going to get interesting, if the Dean campaign follow up, as joe-jobbing an election campaign is in violation of federal election law, and is apparently taken quite seriously.

Reminder: keep an eye on Spamvertized.Org for the latest news in political spam!

Tags: amazon, blanc, com, ffii, heatwave, indemnification, linux, mont, number, sco

In case you’re trying to reconcile Arlene McCarthy’s public words, about how the proposed EU legislation helps block software and bizmeth patents, and the FFII’s public words saying the opposite, here’s a helpful email thread cross-posted between the Patents list at AFUL.org and the free-sklyarov-uk list.

• The letter asking for clarification on some key points;

• The rather vague reply from AMcC;

• a follow-up from Rui Miguel Seabra;

• one from Bernhard Kaindl;

• and from Hartmut Pilch.

Also, Hartmut Pilch notes a prior letter which as yet remains unanswered; ‘All she has until now ever done is to send out standard answers to unspecific letters from concerned (and possibly naive-sounding) software developpers. Whenever someone tries to ask her more specific questions, there is no response at all. However documenting the fact that there is no response may also help. So please remember the public letter and point demand a response at every opportunity.’

The Financial Times has an article (paying subscribers only, but that link excerpts a part) which makes clear the difficulties. ‘oftware protection regulations across EU member states should be harmonized while also allowing software developers to carry on without the threat of patent searches and litigation hanging over their heads. He argues that the EU directive’s wording is opaque: The proposal lists computer implemented inventions as patentable, but this definition fails to establish whether it refers to software algorithms or inventions whose usability is dependent on software. Cane also notes that it is harder to see parallels in software invention and physical invention, and argues that there are few truly novel software inventions because most software is based upon prior work carried out by other people.’ (thanks to Gary Robinson for the link)

Tags: bizmeth, case, ffii, invention, legislation, letter, link, list, response, software

FFII have issued a press release: ‘2000 IT bosses say NO to EU software patents, call for rejection of McCarthy software patent directive proposal’:

A ‘Petition for a Free Europe without Software Patents’ has gained more than 150000 signatures. Among the supporters are more than 2000 company owners and chief executives and 25000 developpers and engineers from all sectors of the European information and telecommunication industries, as well as more than 2000 scientists and 180 lawyers. Companies like Siemens, IBM, Alcatel and Nokia lead the list of those whose researchers and developpers want to protect programming freedom and copyright property against what they see as a ‘patent landgrab’.

Reminder: there’s only 7 days left before the plenary on June 30th, so if you’re European, write to your MEP backing FFII’s position. Full text here.

Tags: call, directive, ffii, mccarthy, patent, press, proposal, rejection, release, software