I was asking Google News whether there were any reports from the meeting
on 25/26 November, and it gave me this article from 24 Nov:
http://cbs.marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?guid=%7B4D38E83A-C532-4792-8782-D…
(Registration required alas.) The article is
> CBS MarketWatch
>
> Europe debates software patents
> Commentary: EU decision will be crucial to United States
>
> By John C. Dvorak
> Last Update: 3:32 PM ET Nov. 24, 2004
He seems to be saying that if Europe does not adopt the directive (it's
not clear whether he means "as it's currently being considered", i.e.,
without the sanity amendments, or "in some form", or "in the form with
the amendments", but from reading the rest I think he means "in its
current form"), the US will suffer. The other way of looking at that is
"if Europe does adopt this directive, Europe will suffer" of course.
A couple of excerpts:
> If the European patent plan is not adopted, the United States could be
> at a huge competitive disadvantage from which it may be impossible to
> recover.
Or "Europe will be at a huge competitive advantage if it does *NOT*
adopt this patent plan".
> If the rest of the world does not agree with the United States [...]
Important
> products developed in Europe could be illegal to import into the United
> States because of possible patent violations. If these are important
> tools that give users a competitive advantage, American companies would
> suffer without them.
"If Europe forbids software patents, Europe will be able to develop
innovative products while American companies are mired in wrangling by
patent lawyers."
> The European Union has many of the same
> commercial pressures as the United States does. Big corporations benefit
> the most from large patent portfolios and patent licensing.
He goes on to give the example of IBM, a large American company.
> The United States is the world's most
> important market, so it's unlikely that Europe wants to create a
> bureaucratic nightmare by having totally different patent rules for
> software.
>
> That said, the current U.S. administration has done nothing to endear
> itself to the Europeans. Friends such as Poland have already said "no"
> to software patents. So anything can happen.
He also gives FFII as the "for more information" link. All quite
interesting.
Has there been any feedback from the 25/26 meeting?
Ben.
From The Register
Linus and friends lead charge against software patents
By Lucy Sherriff
Published Tuesday 23rd November 2004 14:38 GMT
Three of the big names in Open Source have publicly appealed for the EU Council to ditch the European directive on computer implemented inventions. Linus Torvalds, Michael Widenius and Rasmus Lerdorf (creative forces behind Linux, MySQL and PHP, respectively), have slammed the current draft of the directive as "deceptive, dangerous, and democratically illegitimate".
The main issue is that the directive is tabled to be passed in a meeting on 25-26 November as an "A Item". This means it will not be discussed further, but will be waved through as is. Such a move would lack democratic legitimacy, Torvalds et al argue, because of the new voting weights in the parliament. These apply in the EU Council from this month onwards.
The countries that voted for the directive on 18 May fall short of a qualified majority, based on today's vote allocation. In addition, two governments, Germany and the Netherlands, whose representative supported the bill, have spoken out against its content, and Poland has withdrawn its support altogether.
The three open source luminaries also warn that software patents are dangerous to the European economy, and pose a particular threat to the new member states. Those who oppose software patents have long argued that far from giving small businesses tools to protect themselves from big companies, patents leave small business exposed. A patent is expensive to acquire and maintain - the average cost of a European patent is between €30-40k. Even then, it isn't necessarily defensible:
"A company needs a very large number of such patents in order to be able to enter into "cross-licensing" agreements with multinationals that own tens of thousands of patents each," the writers point out.
They conclude: "For the sake of innovation and a competitive software market, we sincerely hope that the European Union will seize this opportunity to exclude software from patentability and gain a major competitive advantage in the information age."
The full statement can be found here http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/intro/app0411.html, in English, on the NoSoftwarePatents campaign website.
Hi all.
Our static web site is a little out of date. I've created a Wiki page
for people to leave notes on what needs to be changed. You can also
put suggests there, but they may not be taken up immediately.
http://www.ifso.ie/cgi-bin/wiki.cgi/IfsoWebPages
Malcohol.
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Hi there.
Tomorrow is the third Tuesday of the month, so we'll be having an IFSO
meeting.
The details:
2000h in Mahaffey's Pub in Dublin City Centre. Mahaffey's is at the
crossroads where Pearse St. meets Westland Row. IFSO meetings are open to
all.
Good luck,
Malcolm.
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