Seeing the struggles in the U.S. on software patents was that Britain and the rest of Europe spread, if not the single patent in force

Just as the U.S. software industry is experiencing the long-awaited all-out software patent wars, the European Union has a plan to follow the same course. If the Hargreaves report prompted the British to prevent software patents, the British government had already a plan that they impose likely to be approved.

Software patents are dangerous for software developers, because they impose monopolies on software ideas. It is not possible or safe to develop in the non-trivial software if you have a maze of patents thread. (See patent absurdity, Guardian, 20 June 2005.)

Each program combines many ideas, a great program implemented thousands of them. Google has recently estimated there could be 250 000 patented ideas in a smartphone. I find this number plausible because in 2004 I estimated that the GNU / Linux operating system some 100,000 patented ideas actually implemented. (Linux, the kernel, Dan Ravicher was found on 283 of those ideas included, and was to be 25% of the entire system at the time.)

The consequences are now spreading to manifest in the United States, but multinational companies have long been lobbying against software patents in the world. In 2005, Parliament adopted the second reading of a policy that had been proposed by the European Commission to approve software patents. The Parliament had been the policy be changed in order to reject it, but the ? Europe had made these changes.

The commission 's text was written in a sneaky way: if they read by laymen, it seemed to patents on software ideas to ban because it has a patent application is required to have a physical aspect. However, it did not require the "inventive step" - the advance that a patentable "invention" is - they themselves to be physical.

This meant that a patent application, the required physical aspect was only by the mention of the usual physical elements of the computer that is running the program (processor, memory, display, etc) would represent. It would not be any progress in these physical elements to propose, she only mentioned as part of the larger system with the software. Each mathematical idea could be patented in this way. Such a patent would be intended only to software to run on a computer, but that was not much of a restriction, since it is not practicable, a large range of hand simulation run.

A massive grassroots effort directed at convincing the European parliament to change its mind resulted in defeat of the directive. But that does not mean we convinced half of parliament to reject software patents. Rather, it seems the pro-patent forces decided at the last minute to junk their own proposal.

The volunteer activists drifted away, thinking the battle won, but the corporate lobbyists for software patents were paid to stay on the job. Now they have contrived another sneaky method: the "unitary patent" system proposed for the EU. Under this system, if the European Patent Office issues a patent, it will automatically be valid in every participating country, which in this case means all of the EU except for Spain and Italy.

What would be on the software patents? Obviously, this would allow either the unitary patent system software patents and it wouldn 't. If it makes them, no country is able to escape on their own. That would be bad, but what if the system rejects software patents? Then it would be good - right?

Right - with the exception of the plan was designed to prevent that. A small but crucial detail in the plan is that complaints against the EPO \ s own rules' s decisions on the basis of the EPO \ would be decided. "The EPA could thus tie the European Economic and computer users in knots, her heart 's contents.

Note that the EPA has a vested interest in extending patents to be in as many areas of life, as it can get away. With external borders (like the national courts) removed, the EPA to impose software patents or other kind of controversial patents. For example, if you choose it, that the natural genes are patentable, as a U.S. appeals court has only chooses, no one could reverse this decision with the possible exception of the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the highest court in Europe.

In fact, the EPO's decision about software patents has already been made, and can be seen in action. The EPO has issued tens of thousands of software patents, in contempt for the treaty that established it. (See http://webshop.ffii.org/, "Your web shop is patented".) At present, though, each state decides whether those patents are valid. If the unitary patent system is adopted and the EPO gets unchecked power to decide, Europe will get US-style patent wars.

The ECJ ruled in March that a unitary patent system would have to be subject to its jurisdiction, but it isn't clear whether its jurisdiction would include substantive policy decisions such as "can software ideas be patented?" That's because it's not clear how the European Patent Convention relates to the ECJ.

If the Court can decide this, the plan would no longer sure disaster. Instead, the ball is one stop before the disaster would bounce.

Prior to the adoption of such a system should describe Europe's plan to certain software is safe from patents. If this can 't be done, the next best thing to reject the plan entirely. Minor simplifications are not worth a disaster, harmonization is a misguided goal when doing things wrong is everywhere.

The British government seems to want the disaster, as declared in December 2010 that they did not want the ECJ have a say about the system. Will the government listen to Hargreaves and change their mind about this plan? Britons have insisted.

More information can be found on the disadvantages and shortcomings of this plan may be legal in unitary-patent.eu.

. You will notice that the term "intellectual property" has not been used in this article. That 's because the term spreads confusion, because it is used a dozen independent laws. Even if we only consider the patent and copyright law, they are so different in their conditions and effects, which is a generalization about the two failed. Absolutely nothing in this article refers to the copyright. To avoid generalizations about what people are unequal laws, I've never been the definition of "intellectual property", and I never miss it not.

. Richard Stallman will be speaking this week in Leeds, Nottingham, Birmingham and Edinburgh, see fsf.org for more details.

Copyright 2011 Richard Stallman. Published under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License.