WTB124
From What The Wiki?!
(This is the Patents Intellectual Property transcription, tape 124. It is part of Transcribing the Rehash videos, aka What The Book.)
Webshop illustration: http://webshop.ffii.org/
[124/03:48]Welcome everybody. Unfortunately, you can all hear me? Unfortunately Wiebe van de Worp who is the founder and the chairman of vrijschrift.org cannot be here due to personal circumstances. So Harmen and I take over the presentation. So we had to quickly hack a presentation. Tomorrow morning Jeroen Dekkers and Benjamin Henrian will talk about lobbying on an European scale and they will say a lot about the lobbying against software patents in Brussels and in Europe. So for the details of the lobby, those will be talked about tomorrow. I will say a few more general things about software patents and Harmen will talk about DRM and copyright things and enforcement.
[124/04:51]Well, intellectual property is a strange word but it's mentioned in the paper. A few words about vrijschrift. We are a Dutch foundation. We are sponsored by XS4ALL which gives us quite some bandwide to use on nice things. We were interested in Free and open source software, free learning, Project Gutenburg EU and Software patents and that took most of our time last year. We are associated with the FFII the foundation for free information infrastructure, so we are also called FFII.nl.
[124/05:38]Patents. Patents are exclusive rights on inventions in exchange for the publication of the invention. Now when people think of inventions, people think of steam engines, airplanes and medical scanners, things like that. But what happends is that minor changes to these inventions are inventions in themselves too. This is incremental development. To give an example, a car is an invention. Now in the old days the side mirrors of the cars were not attached to the doors, but to the front of the car. At a certain point someone said "...hey! It's more effective to put them on the door." And that simple idea has been patented. So you have an invention, an airplane or what so ever, but minor changes to them are inventions as well and that causes a lot of problems.
[124/06:40]When you give out patents for minor changes, big companies can amass, lots of patents, they're building up large patent portfolio's, They can finance their research departments that way. So far so good. But those massive patent portfolio's are used strategically. And small companies and newcomers can't enter the market. We will see more about that.
[124/07:15]In a way it's a fight between big and small companies. We have few very big companies and you have many small companies. It's hard for small companies to organise themselves and usually the big companies win in these kind of cases.
[124/07:40]When you give out patents for software, software is highly incremental, ideas keep being added. Software is full of ideas. What we are seeing now is that software is filling up with patents. In the United States there are about 150,000 software patents and in Europe there are about 30,000 to 50,000 software patents. It is impossible or becoming impossible to write software without violating patents. Well, maybe you manage to not violate the patents, but you will never know, because there are just too many. Software patents create a legal minefield for software developers.
[124/08:35]A simple webshop in Europe can violate 23 patents (Webshop illustration: http://webshop.ffii.org/) and in the top left corner you see for instance tabs, we all know tabs, from telephone books and agendas, but when you apply it to a computer it's an invention, and then they call it an invention to create more space on a screen, something like that. And it is patentable. All these 23 patents, you see 20 here, but some have 2 patents on it, have been issued by the European Patent Office. You see things like the shopping cart, number 4. At a certain point the state secretary in the Netherlands said the technique behind a shopping cart should be patentable. And then accidently we found the code for this in Programming in Java for Dummies. It's about 240 lines of code, a few hours of work. Then you have an exclusive right on the shoppingcart technologie for 20 years. It's owned by Sun Microsystems.
[124/09:55]Most of these patents are owned by really big multinationals, like here the "search results", number 18, is owned by Philips, I don't remember about all the others who are owning them. But you really see familiar names.
[124/10:21]On the 6th of June 2005 the European parlement rejected the software patent directive. Yeah that's really great
[124/10:33] --APPLAUSE--
[124/10:41]The good thing about this, is that the practice of the European Patent Office is not legalized. They wanted to legalize their practice, and then it's written in concrete, for the next 10 or 20 years, it's impossible to change it, that did not happend. But the European Patent Office practice of giving out software patents, and very very trivial ones, that is not stopped. And the fight is really difussed right now, that really is a problem. But the FFII will go on, that's pretty clear.
[124/11:44]Without the FFII and other organizations, like the FSE Europe, the directive would have been pushed through years ago and it was the internet that made it possible to united effectively. Mailinglists, wiki, IRC, and you can really find a lot of information on the internet and you can spread it. Internet really changed lobbying. And this time the big companies didn't win. Although it's more a draw, because the practice goes on.
[124/12:28]Harmen will say some things about copright.
