Submitted by The European Parliament today decided by a large majority to reject the software patents directive. This rejection was the logical answer to the Commission’s refusal to restart the legislative process in February and the Council’s unwillingness to engage in any kind of dialogue with the Parliament. Update: Sun and Red Hat made a joint statement today.
At least some politicians can still see what is good and what is bad.
At least in Europe. The USA still has a looonng way to go in that light.
(And I am an American. Just disgusted with my government.)
I just want add another voice to Thank Goodness, and I hope America gets its head out of its @#$.
I to am …”an American. Just disgusted with my government.”
Thank god! I, and many others with me here in Europe, have been waiting for this big NO in many years already.
The European Parliament is really rather fair when it comes to marketing and politics, and has always been 100% against monopoly in a capitalist society, but this whole ordeal has really made me start to wonder.
Break out the champagne!
This is a big win for freedom of code expression. I am happy about this decision.
I’m extremely happy about this. This gives Europe a clear advantage over the US when it comes to software development. Let’s hope that the US government also gets their heads out of the sand on this and reform their patent system.
I’m also thrilled that the number of proponents was only 14!
Even with Europe showing a good example on this one, it seems very unlikely that anything will happen in the US. Maybe I’m just too impatient (or cynical), but US legislators seem very slow to do anything without significant monetary incentives.
This is a big relief.
http://www.europe.redhat.com/news/article/431.html
Important victory. I’m european, and as a developer i was really scared about a law decided by people who put money before creativity.
This must be the first time I have seen the EU parliament do something right for once.
Well done to everyone that protested with there feet
Finally, we win !!! 🙂
This is not USA, and we continue to fight against software patents!
A happy developer.
Only 14 voted yes to patents, but according to Swedish newspapers the Yes-men joined the No side to make it possible to work out a new proposition. This means that they will/may eventually work out a new proposition, and the process starts all over again.
We may rejoice for the moment, but we don’t know how long it will last.
“Only 14 voted yes to patents, but according to Swedish newspapers the Yes-men joined the No side to make it possible to work out a new proposition. This means that they will/may eventually work out a new proposition, and the process starts all over again. ”
Nope not a chance, the European commission ( who is entitled to propose new laws) already officially declared they never will propose something like that again.
Great! I’m from Brazil, but I’ll celebrate too!
I was considering emigrating to Brazil, but maybe now I don’t have to. 😉
Could it be that there is some justice yet in this world?
It had looked like the amendments might make it in and Big business had apparently changed position and backed the No campaign.
I don’t expect they’ll give up, it’ll come back but for now we’re OK.
hopefully though the problems becoming apparent in the US system and the reaction to the European proposals will lead to it being rather more thought out.
No boom today, boom tomorrow, there’s always a boom tomorrow.
P.S. Thanks Eugenia.
Unfortunately this isn’t the end of software patents in europe. The rejection of the directive means that the status quo persists (at least for a while). There are 30000 software patents approved by the european patent office already – without legal basis and a lot of them questionable. Also there is still no common base of patent law for all members of the european union.
It would have been much better, if the directive _with_ the changes recommended by the european parlament would have passed.
I’m not sure exactly what the proposed changes were, but I agree with the idea that it would be good to have a definitive reform that stated either we do or do not have software patents (of course I’d want it to say we don’t — having it in writing would be a good thing).
The commission will probably not be best pleased about this; they may try again. I don’t think the war will ever really be won, but this is a very nice step in the right direction (“what a refreshing change” :-)).
Somebody in Europe got their heads out of their rectal cavities long enough to realise that this one was just too big to screw up.
Awesome!
On the other hand: once you have that software patent, it’s only good for what: 17 years?
After that the patent is gone and you can start using it for free. In the mean time you’ve got some serious problems but at least it’s a limited time period.
Not like the ridiculous Disney patent which will still be ‘valuable intellectual property’ when the aliens come to annex the planet.
Ummmm…. Disney doesn’t have patents they have copyright. It’s copyright that keeps getting extended to infinity -1 day. According to the Supremes, as long as it’s never “permanent” it passes muster.
People like newSCO, Plexar, and the backers of the DMCA would like copyright treated as if it were a patent, but try to to confuse the two.
anon-e-mouse
Let the coding begin.
great news
I was receiving FFII updates about this. If you combine this outcome and EU rules about reverse engineering, you have a very liberal ecosystem which protects small business and innovation.
While I’m been critical towards some opensource projects, it’s important that rules can protect such projects and such developers against advantages big companies have. It’s important that you have freedom to decide which form your company/movement/group/team might have without worrying about someone putting roadblocks to what you can do.
<irony>Now it’s time to prove that such projects can actually deliver better innovation</irony>
Since I live in Europe, I’m glad that EU decided that innovation is a key factor to economic growth.
However, I think the fact that major software players are US (or non-EU) companies had a meaning in such decision. Having a strict patent law now would mean cutting legs to any EU company willing to compete.
This surely also helps big companies not to rely on their supposed rights and sleep but force them to deliver constant innovation in order to stay in.
Bravo EU.
atleast one positive thing from EU 🙂
As European, I’m happy. I hope that this will push to a revision of US laws about software patents.
The war isn’t won yet, but this is a very good day.
Now if only we could have won the Olympic Games ;(
Yes! This is great.. really!
Europa Universalis!
This is the news item of the year!
Congrats to the EU parliament for making such a wise choice.
Sorry for being euphoric, but I think this is a major decision for the free world.
It is at last truly over. The forces of darkness have been defeated and freedom has prevailed. The patent trolls will be back of course but we will be ready for them.
The patenting of pure software will never be tolerated – that is the strong and overriding message that the parliament delivered today and those corporates who want otherwise must take heed. The next time they come they will have to make serious compromises if we are ever to get close to accepting any kind of patenting of software.
It is at last truly over. The forces of darkness have been defeated and freedom has prevailed. The patent trolls will be back of course but we will be ready for them.
The patenting of pure software will never be tolerated – that is the strong and overriding message that the parliament delivered today and those corporates who want otherwise must take heed. The next time they come they will have to make serious compromises if we are ever to get close to accepting any kind of patenting of software.
Sadly enough the nightmare is far from begin over.
There’s just too much money involved; The big software giants will not give up that easily.
(A good example is the current MS XML/DOC patent)
Gilboa
I’m from India and I’m happy for Europeans. Just look for all American patents and code them into your applications in Europe
Europe is not America’s enslaved Colony!!! But America is trying hard… eventually loose to the spirit of freedom.
I’m so happy, I prayed for that to happen. Blessings to all Open Source developers and users! May you all live in peace and harmony.
seriously … go home
the real power in the EU is in the counsil, and the commission wields much power. historically, the parliament is weak, but it has grown stronger the last 10 years.
how will the counsil and the commision react? after much criticism about the lach of democratic decision making, they will have a hard time to neglect this decision.
this will make it easier for national parliaments to put pressure on their executives. because the counsil consists of the presidents / heads of states of the member countries, this can have a big impact.
I’m so glad software patents have been rejected ! They were totally absurd, as copyright law is more than enough to protect innovation. I hope there will never be software patents in Europe. Now if only the US and Japan could also abandon software patents !
Go go go innovation and free competition !
This bill, or a similar one, is going to be run through the system again in a few years. Now is not the time to rest.
This is important for all european company, large and small, because entering later in the software patents is only a disadvantage.
That’s it, i’m leaving this wretched country (us).
Does this mean that every Open Source Software tree has to have two branches? US and Europe?
Thank you American lawyers!
There were three possible ends to this:
– Aprove patents directive
– Aprove patents directive with heavily restricting amendments, preventing patentability on software
– Dissmis patents directive.
The best end to this all would have definitely be the second one, since law would have stated clear that software could not be patented. Now, they simply have free way to try once again. The Comission has already stated they will not propose a new draft… but I see this whole thing coming up again in 2, 3 or 4 years. Aproving the directive with the restricting amendments would have ensured that we would not have to think about this for a very looong time.
You’re wrong. The parliament didn’t have the power to
“Aprove patents directive with heavily restricting amendments, preventing patentability on software”. They could approve it or dismiss it, but if they had made “heavily restricting amendments”, the parliament and the council would have had to find a compromise and the council could still have dismissed the directive.
However, since there doesn’t seem to be a majority for software patents in the council, maybe there had been a real possibility to ban software patents “for a very looong time” if the parliament had voted for the amendments instead of dismissing the directive.
“Old Europe”? – “Good Europe”!
-> now software will require
./configure –disable-software-patents
to enable US-patented algorithms to work
let’s focus on coding again, but don’t let the big, bad guys out of sight for they’ll come back anyway
This is Europe, Earth.
that the commies won in the end.
Does anyone else find it strange that SUN Microsystems endorsed this? Consider the following from Shwartz’s weblog
“we believe there is real value in intellectual property, real (if maximally defensive) value even in software patents (notwithstanding the USPTO’s atrocious track record). But nonetheless, we’d been criticized for our unwillingness to allow Java to fork, for continuing our investment in the open sourcing of Solaris (while our peers dumped their OS’s for Linux), and for resisting the position that software patents should be banned entirely.”
This seems to contradict the “SUN is with RedHat in defending OSS against software patents” bit. Maybe the forces within SUN are not aligned?
As an aside, patenting software seems very much like patenting mathematical formulas and ideas. I wish that the American patent system would reject algorithmic and broad “idea-based” patents. I also think that patents are necessary and good in some situtations. However, the market moves far too quickly and the timelines for patents should be reduced to (possibly?) 5 years.
U.S. – Europe
0 – 1
😉
This is what the big companies wanted. They didn’t like the changes to the proposal. They are going to try to come back with something worse then what was on the table.
Good luck Europe, you will need it.
I’m optimistic about the outcome.There’s been a great struggle to get the Europeean legislation law through.Due to some tough opposition “play” there’s a greater Europeean awareness than ever and the legislation law fortunately didn’t make it.People have somewhat more opened their eyes.Some proposals will never make it no matter what amount of money is put in favor of it.With some issues you still can’t come home.I hope the patent law is one of them for good.
The Europeean union has more on it’s mind than the patent issue for years to come.They have to reinvent it’s identity and cohesion.In times when there’s plenty of resources there’s a lot of opportunity to push laws through the chambers.Now we all are going into rough weather there’re a lot of waking eye’s who could ignite the publics awareness in the good sence and the climate isn’t particularly in favor.So i don’t worry to much about the patent issue regarding the future.However the battle isn’t over.
… I am. This is certainly a day to celebrate.
And a moment to realize there is still much to be done to raise general awareness of the matter, so that we do not have to go through this again.
Myself, I have a tiny IT company, that’s planning to go into the software business, and the directive was a very serious threat to my company’s existence.
They should now rid Europe of all copyrights and trademarks! Although many software patents should be disputed and removed. Many patents protect the intellectual property of our day to day lives.
They should now rid Europe of all copyrights and trademarks!
It would not be a very good idea to get rid of copyrights, as they are the foundation of commonly known free licencs such as the GPL.
The difference between copyrights and patents are that patens prevent you from having similar thoughts, while copyrights is about prevent cut and paste copy.
In essense copyrights is a friend of OSS, while patents are evil.
I find it really amazing that people from all over the world are happy for us Europeans that there won’t be software patents soon (as somebody already posted here, the fight really isn’t over, the European parliament just voted against these guidelines, because *both sides* weren’ happy with that last version).
This shows that software patents are a very hot subject all over the world, not only in germany. I especially appreaciate the comments from citizens from the USA, which in turn was the negative example for software patents and the main reason why we don’t want them over here.
But still, any member of the EU might introduce software patents, simply because now there is no directive from the common EU government any more.
Really, the fight is only at rest, but not over yet.
This is the way Europe works. They will go and rehash the proposal and keep coming back until they all agree, so we will end up with some kind of software patents.
I just hope the resistance keeps up so we will end up with a greatly weakend version. Maybe even a sensible version (hey I can dream can’t I ?)
In the meantime they made a good call this time around.
I was just wondering who had final power over patent use, the EU or the sovreign state (UK for example)
If each country can overide this vote it seems a very hollow victory…
awesome news…makes my day…should serve as a trendsetter for other nations about to decide on this issue.
It sounds like it was struck down because the governmental structure started stalling and yelling at each other, not because people realized there was something wrong with patenting software. Either the article wasn’t specific enough about their motivations for the breakdown in communications, or this just slipped through the cracks. Open Source programmers seem to have won by default, and hopefully the opponents will be too tired to try again.
Now we need to reform the patent laws in the US, where they don’t pay attention to who invented or thought of or used the idea first. Microsoft could probably go and patent the computer mouse. Or heck, maybe even a real mouse.
This is the only direction of software future !
developer
well, what sun defeats ?
http://gauss.ffii.org/PatentView/EP1170667
nice to know…a trivial patent for Europe
joint-statement with RedHat ? Well, don’t smoke so crude things…
And RedHat, take a closer look to your joint-partner …
cheers Frank
This means that development on most of the opensource software frameworks can continue in Europe. WOW! They will be around for ever now!
I have read much… but from the press release of Redhat and Sun the statement: ‘The Parliamentary rejection represents a request for better legislation; legislation that will ensure that software “as such” is not patentable.’ is very encouraging going forward.
Hope for the best now.
it means, a battle was lost, the war is not coming to an end.
the commission can give a new sw-directive.
and us – companies, like sun, still tries to get trivial patents in europe, and, possibly get them.
It means : next try a litte bit later.
Its not over. It is just in the state as it was before,
nothing changed. Discussion and lobbyists will continue and take the next chance for the homerun.
cheers
frank
I enjoy mplayer, knoppix, and all other projects that would be affected by this change.
Wahoo..
~alime
As a software company that inovates, this is a real bad news for any company and for and to the company employers. Only a communist or someone that don’t have to protect their inventions software rights could say this is a good news.
This is a good news to opensource community, but not to commercial company’s software.
Opensource model: Why go to university to learn programming? As a company why we need programmers? We need only vendors to give support to code that almost students do for free. This is a communist model, and stop progress.
As a Polish citizen that knows Lech Walesa and resistance against communism in Poland, I can tell you, that you really have no idea what real communism is.
You should learn more about terms you use, then you probably notice that big companies with software patents are just like USSR with nuclear weapon during Cold War. This situation is much more similar to communism than Open Source movement.
This is generally good news, especially for small ISVs and for OSS.
But makes me wonder, what power made this result happen? Certainly not healthy sense of politicians (such thing doesn’t exist).
For example here, in Estonia, some months ago all estonian politicians, including these few, working in EU structures, looked brain-washed by Microsoft. They said “Yes” to sw patents, they talked actively with Microsoft about using MS sw (OS+office) widely in schools (at price about $4/PC per year!) and so on.
Today almost nobody’s talking about MS (I mean politicians). Our representatives in EU voted AGAINST software patents. What’s happening? Is this another round of economical “war” against USA domination? Maybe. Is this lobby of some anti-MS software vendors? Maybe. Well, let’s see, what future brings.
I mean, some parts of Mono aren’t part of the ECMA standard – e.g. WinForms, ASP.NET, ADO.NET.
I’m living in the EU – and i want to port a commercial .NET app to Mono – am I now safe in terms of legal issues ?
we in the eu are not the 51st state of the us.
there have been loads of people in the uk prosecuted by US film companies, under US law, whats the story with that ?
lately, I have heard a leiutenant called a “loo-tenant” not the proper “left-tenant”… we are not US people, and never will be. We do not need to learn their version of English, we got our own thanks.
I am from Europe and prior to the voting my company and I have supported the opposition to patents at http://petition.eurolinux.org . Those of you that want and can, give and continue giving your support!
Your a class A idiot. You are bashing sun because they own patents in europe? oh my god. Red Hat owns patents too.. they both own patents to protect the open source industry. if they don’t register patents others will. id figure an idiot would have to bash sun because they’re idiots
thanks,
you had read the patent ?
Well, its like a one-click.
And you had read its in europe, not in the US.
Well, I guess you can’t read, or you can’t understand it.
Read it, and try to get this patent to your brain.
Cheers,
a Class-A-Idoit, but able to read _AND_ understand
Good news for small companies and open source!!
Following on from the news that Amazon have just recently patented the “people who bought this also bought these” (and a couple of other pretty store-front-essential techniques), this is indeed great news for web developers.
It worries me that these patents are constantly being registered in the background noise of our lives, under our noses and feet like some kind of legal sewage system, spanning villages, towns, cities and continents.
I read today that despite the flux-state of the patent laws in the EU, the European Patent Office has registered 30,000 patents already. How is this even possible?
At some point in the distant future, if the USA doesn’t revise it’s insane system, there’s going to be a patent war. Imagine; Amazon and Microsoft team up against Google and IBM, Apple joins in, then Sony, Panasonic, Philips, etc. …the dialogue, the “taking sides”, the cross-licencing litigation bombardment, the casualties and the aftermath, the stuff of a sci-fi horror story.
No wonder some American senitors and CEOs are starting to get a little twitchy about the US Patent laws….it’s just plain wrong in so many ways.
I am happy about the recent success, but also very sceptic about on long term.
As European developers at a small sofware firm, we clearly see that big corporations will kill us with their patent portfolio if it is accepted.
The sorry thing is that the important decisions are made by lazy, overpaid, corruptable and incompetent bureocrats, who create committees for every proposal, and these committees often composed of lobbyist…
the future is the EU will probably will overflown by bureaucracy…
But we should still be aware, we won single battle, but not the war… I suppose that the big patent holders are already finding another way…
well, as a class-a-idiot, I see that this patent is a trivial patent, which should not worth a patent.
I guess, you read the patent, and you know what do you say. And, I guess, you didn’t understand the rights in europe. possibly, you live in the US or elsewhere.
And, hey, Siemens, DC, IBM a.s.o. all they are doing patents to protect OpenSource, like Sun did.
Well, you must live and code in another galaxy….
Cheers,
Frank
…YYYYYYYYYYEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEESSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!
Ah, sweet relief. I was a bit worried there for a while.
This just made my day!
> How will this affect Mono ?
I believe it won’t.
> I’m living in the EU – and i want to port a
> commercial .NET app to Mono – am I now safe
> in terms of legal issues ?
Rewrite it. That’s safe.
Ask any commercial European software company whether they consider it good news or not and you may be in for a big surprise. Actually a little googling the subject might turn out quite revealing to you.
Of course I’m not talking about multinational molochs that haven’t much in common with Europe except for the fact of having local offices there. But they do not form European economy. It’s Europe’s thousands of SME, that were against the directive.
Your innovation-meaningless-buzzword is well protected in Europe by good copyright law and licences.
And stop talking about communism you know *nothing* about. I suggest you read a little. Perhaps start with (very old) Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at noon.”, read some European history (Norman Davies is good) and exercise your brain.
[a]
This is great news for the FOSS community. I am really happy that the European politicians came out with a landmark verdict that promotes freedom to innovate in software.
I am from India, but this decision makes me happy all the more since I am a member of an EU opensource project based in Norway.
Europe has effectively told big american business that it will not allow arm-twisting into following US practices in trade and business decisions that are concerned with IP. Now the big, bad U.S businesses will have to save their energy for another day, another fight. But I am sure FOSS will prevail!