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.)

Every program combines many ideas; a large program implements thousands of them. Google recently estimated there might be 250,000 patented ideas in a smartphone. I find that figure plausible, because in 2004 I estimated that the GNU/Linux operating system implemented around 100,000 actually patented ideas. (Linux, the kernel, had been found by Dan Ravicher to contain 283 such ideas, and was estimated to be 25% of the whole 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 effort to convince the basis to change the European Parliament's opinion was directed by the defeat of the Directive. But that does not mean that we convinced to reject half of the Parliament against software patents. Rather, it seems, decided to pro-patent forces in the last minute, their own proposal junk.

The volunteer activists drifted away, thinking the battle won, but the lobbyists for software patents have been paid to remain on the job. Now they have invented another sneaky method: "single patent" for the EU proposed. Under this system, when the European Patent Office issues a patent, it is automatically valid in each participating country, which in this case that all of the EU, with the exception of 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 - except the plan was designed to prevent that. A small but crucial detail in the plan is that appeals against the EPO's decisions would be decided based on the EPO's own rules. The EPO could thus tie European business and computer users in knots to its heart's content.

Note that the EPO has a vested interest in extending patents into as many areas of life as it can get away with. With external limits (such as national courts) removed, the EPO could impose software patents, or any other controversial kind of patents. For instance, if it chooses to decide that natural genes are patentable, as a US appeals court just did, no one could reverse that decision except perhaps the European Court of Justice (ECJ), the highest court in Europe.

In fact, the EPO 's ruling on software patents already made, and can be seen in action. The EPA has tens of thousands of software patents, in contempt for the treaty that established it. (See http://webshop.ffii.org/, "Your webshop is patented".) At the moment, however, each state decides whether these patents are valid. If the unitary patent system is accepted and the EPO gets to decide unchecked power, Europe will get US-style patent wars.

The Court in March ruled that a unitary patent system would have to be under their jurisdiction, but it isn 't clear whether its jurisdiction would be content-related decisions, such as "may software ideas can be patented?" For example include \ That' s because it 's not clear how the European Patent Convention relating 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.