Here's one for you: the European Parliament voted Wednesday to approve legislation on software patents. But apparently - though it's hard to tell (this is EU legislation, after all) - the legislation does not mean software itself can be patented.
This Bill engendered furious debate among parliamentarians and those trying to persuade them to vote one way or the other. The reason it was such an attention-getter is that this was a crucial and broad Bill. It covers not just software per se, but is an attempt to simplify and (as they love to say in Brussels and Strasbourg) "harmonise" patent law relating to any "computer-related" inventions.
And therein lies some of the difficulty. A computer-related invention could include anything from a toaster and coffee pot to a computer, an operating system, an automobile, or one of those silly, swivel-hipped dancing Santas you can buy in what used to be known as pound shops.
As in the past, the EU has probably brought in a law affecting all sorts of things in ways it didn't intend, and the legislation will have to be patched up piecemeal as we go along, if it in turn gets past the EU ministers who will look at it in November.
The word is that they are unlikely to go for the Bill, and instead will take the lazy way out and revert EU law back to the sloppy Munich Patent Convention, which is the legal base for the hodgepodge patent regime in place at the European Patent Office (EPO).
In the lead-up to today's vote, advocates against the legislation argued that it would damage small businesses, which cannot afford to do the checks on all the code they write, or to defend work challenged by larger, deep-pocketed corporations (and such challenges by the big firms have been a hallmark of the US computing industry because big companies know the mere threat of legislation usually ends up producing, one way or another, the result they want).
There's also concern that little innovation will take place when all previous work is patented and cannot be used as a basis for developing further products - this would be the opposite of the model that held for the vast part of the computing boom and, for example, produced the internet, the personal computer and other innovations.
The pro-legislation people argued that patents would encourage innovation and protect smaller firms from bigger ones stealing their ideas, as they'd be forced to form partnerships or take out licensing agreements.
Hmmm. Then why was small business almost entirely on the no-patents side, while the big corporations and their lobby groups, such as the Business Software Alliance (BSA), were on the pro-patent side? I'll leave you to figure that one out.
An additional worry for the anti-patent crowd is that the legislation could outlaw reverse engineering. Reverse engineering is a method of figuring out how something works by starting with the finished product and then taking it apart until you understand it well enough to create your own version of it.
If that sounds worrying then keep in mind that reverse engineering gave us the Windows operating system. Windows was reverse engineered from IBM's operating system, which was the only commercial PC system in the nascent PC world. Ironically, Microsoft is a huge backer of the BSA and the right to patent.
Reverse engineering is also used in computer forensics to help solve crimes, and to test the capabilities of security systems. Make it a crime, and you really throw the baby out with the bathwater. The good news is that some of the Bill's worst aspects were dropped or amended after hundreds of smaller businesses, open source and free software advocates, researchers, academics and others voiced concern to legislators.
In particular, algorithms cannot be patented, nor can "business process" applications, like the one-click purchasing method Amazon patented in the US.
It's good news too that MEPs listen when lobbied in an organised manner. Here, we complain constantly about what "they" do over there in Brussels while forgetting that "they" include our own elected representatives, and that "they" are part of a larger governing body of which we are, actually, a part. So if you don't agree with what is happening in the EU, get off your duff and phone, or write to, an MEP. Or vote one out or in.
But back to software patents. I'd like to explain what this Yes vote means, and what will happen as a result of different aspects of the legislation. But I don't really know. Some 90 amendments were proposed and many were approved in a final package.
That leaves a labyrinthine piece of legislation that reportedly has had its biggest teeth pulled. But we'll have to wait till the lawyers get their teeth into it to begin to make some sense of what we might have just inflicted upon ourselves. And then, there's another wait to see what the ministers think of it.
If you care about software and "computer-related inventions", this would be a good time to read up on what this legislation looks like and what it could mean. Then make your views heard by our MEPs and our Government, so that you, too, get a chance to contribute to the debate and influence the vote.
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