Fighting Software Patents: European of the Year

[Seth Johnson]

(Non-Europeans may vote; the poll closes November 11.  -- Seth)


> http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=27473


Fighting software patents

net.wars

By Wendy M. Grossman: Saturday 05 November 2005, 07:31


THERE'S only a week left – voting closes November 11 – to vote
for the EV50 top Europeans of the Year (http://www.ev50.com/).
This year, as The INQ reported in late September
(http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=26408), the nominees for
Campaigner of the Year include Florian Mueller, the driving force
behind NoSoftwarePatents (http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/).

Actually, though, there are a couple of other EV50 nominees you
can vote for if you want to send a message opposing software
patents. Michel Rocard (nominated for MEP of the year) was the
European Parliament's rapporteur on this topic, and José Luis
Rodriguez Zapatero (nominated for Statesman of the Year)
represented the only government to vote against the software
patents proposal in the European Council. Finally, Dalia
Grybauskaite, up for Commissioner of the Year, is the only one in
her category that NoSoftwarePatents describes as "a safe choice".

NoSoftwarePatents does have this handy voting guide
(http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/ev50/vote.html), though
most of its other recommendations are, it says, randomly
generated. (You cannot, apparently, vote in only the categories
that interest you; for your vote to count you have to vote in all
of them; seems sort of silly to me, since it guarantees that
anyone who's only interested in one subject will choose people
they know nothing about in all the other categories.) You vote
separately for European of the Year, which is chosen from all 50
nominees.

That an anti-software patents campaigner should be nominated for
an award won by the late Pope is a pretty extraordinary thing. In
the US, when software patents were first mooted, you saw
programmers testifying sedately in front of government officials
in locations around the country; in Europe we're seeing people
protesting in the streets.

The software patents issue is an important fork in the road for
US-Europe trade relations. It's not entirely surprising that it
should be more controversial in Europe, given that most of the
biggest software companies are American. If you regard software
patents as creating artificial monopolies, then the logic is
perfectly clear: allowing software patents will transfer an
increasing amount of economic control to entities with no
allegiance to Europe at all.

Of course, it's arguable that they haven't got all that much
allegiance to the US either; multinational megacorporations tend
to behave as though they were nations in their own right.
Although unlike nation states, they do not have to worry about
taking care of the unemployed. It seems entirely possible that we
are on the verge of a split in the computer industry that will
mirror the existing situation in the television industry. In the
US, television is dominated by commercial interests; what public
service broadcasters there are must fight for every dollar they
get in funding. In Europe, while public broadcasters do not
necessarily dominate, they are far more substantial forces. In
the UK in particular, even after a decade or two of changes and
cutbacks the BBC casts a long shadow over all of broadcasting.

If you think of open source software as computing's equivalent of
public service broadcasting, it's easy to think that Europe will
embrace open source as both the City of Munich (14,000 desktops)
(http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39216394,00.htm)
and the NHS (800,000 desktops)
(http://hardware.silicon.com/desktops/0,39024645,39117233,00.htm)
are trying to do while most of the US remains wedded to
commercial software, whether that's licensed, as now, or provided
as an online service as per Microsoft's Live.com announcement
this week
(http://www.forbes.com/newsletter/2005/11/04/microsoft-google-yahoo-mr_1104bow.xml.html).
People sometimes suggest that open source is at a disadvantage
because users don't have an easy path to technical support; in
the litigious US, the bigger deterrent to its adoption may be
uncertainty over whom to sue. Whatever happens in Europe,
software patents, which will almost certainly continue to be
granted in the US despite calls to reform the US patent system,
could provide some interesting weapons for a trade war.

But that's all somewhat distant speculation. At the moment,
things are looking promising for the opponents of software
patents, and although Florian Mueller is by no means the only or
longest-serving of these, he is the most visible, and the hope is
clearly that securing him and the other nominees highly
publicized awards will send a distinct message to the EU.

It will not be enough by itself. If there's one thing we know
after ten years of public policy surrounding the Internet, it's
that even if software patents fail now in Europe the issue will
not go away. There are many avenues software patent proponents
can take. They can continue to lobby for the passage of the
Computer-Implemented Inventions Directive, being squabbled over
in the Council and in the European Parliament. They can lobby the
national governments of EU member states to get the dissenters to
change their policies. And, in a bout of policy laundering, they
can push for cross-recognition, so that the US automatically
respects EU-issued patents and, more importantly, vice-versa.

The people who want software patents will continue trying for
them via all these avenues, and any others they can find.
Companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Siemens are not going to
suddenly abandon trying to replicate the strategy that has proved
lucrative for them in the US. This battle has a long way to go
yet. µ

Wendy M. Grossman’s Web site has an extensive archive of her
books, articles, and music (http://www.pelicancrossing.net/), and
an archive of all the earlier columns in this series
(http://www.pelicancrossing.net/nwcols.htm). She has an
intermittent blog (http://www.livejournal.com/~wendyg). Readers
are welcome to post there or to send email, but please turn off
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