[lit-ideas] EU Parliament Strucks Down Software Patent Law
- From: Teemu Pyyluoma <teme17@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2005 12:43:54 -0700 (PDT)
I've seen this play so many times I've grown chynical:
A new legistalation usually involving unprecedented
property rights is championed by large IT companies
(mainly IBM and Microsoft) under a pretext that is
insane if you have a clue about the tech. The geekdom
being most programmers and computer scientists, etc.
vocally oppose. Public representatives either due to
being paid off, or more often simply because they have
no understanding of the issues involved pass what the
corporate lawyers wrote as a law. Except it didn't
work out like that this time.
EU Commision presented a bill to harmonize rules on
software patents on EU as they put it. Legally there
is nothign unclear about software patents in EU, you
can't paten´t software because ideas can not be
patented, period. However this was presented as a
technical matter, involving some imaginary distinction
between software per se that is not patentable and
inventions enabled by computer which would be
patentable. Anything implemented by a computer is
software by definition, which is obvious to anyone who
has rudimentary understanding of computers.
So, according to the script, European geeks and others
got organized (http://www.ffii.org/), to educate the
Members of European Parliament (MEPs). This is where
the plot takes an unexpected twists, to their credit
MEPs were remarkably receptive to what are fairly
technical and complex arguments. End result being that
there isn't a single MEP who thought it was just a
matter of harmonizing some laws.
So in the end, after lot of twists including some
obscene efforts by the Commision to bypass the
Parliament, the legistalation is dead and while this
isn't a complete victory, all I can say is WOW! See
Financia Times for example,
http://news.ft.com/cms/s/028f5b2e-ee43-11d9-98e5-00000e2511c8,dwp_uuid=d4f2ab60-c98e-11d7-81c6-0820abe49a01.html
Your elected representatives actually listen to you,
even if it is a complicated and not that popular an
issue, you don't need millions to get access and it
does make a difference. Isn't that how democracy is
supposed to work?
Cheers,
Teemu
Helsinki, Finland
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