Re: [Fsfe-uk] Draft PR on swpat directive

[P.L.Hayes]

Can you say what kind of article this will be Alex? Is it going to be a full 
analysis of the events and issues by someone knowledgeable or just a short 
news item? If the former, I'd like to see two things added to the statement 
from affs or at least that a suggestion be made that the article might 
mention them:

Firstly, I have been disgusted and shocked at the tactics used by the 
pro-swpat lobbies; the disingenuity, the out of hand dismissals of expert 
opinion, of research and of petitions and the nasty stench of corporate 
threats and bribery in the background. Fourtou and McCarthy join Edith 
Cresson and Dame Shirley Porter in the ranks of the most corrupt and 
self-serving female politicians of modern history. It is also apparent that 
the whole business has been largely concocted in order to save the poor 
little EPO from embarrassment because the 'expert' patent examiners therein 
were either ignorant of, or wilfully ignored the law as it stands. Weren't 
most software developers, commercial or otherwise, perfectly happy with 
copyrights until this monstrously stupid proposal appeared - unwanted, 
unasked for and while purporting to be a mere exercise in harmonization, 
proposing drastic and unprecedented changes to what was deemed historically 
the correct approach to questions of patentability?  Should the blasphemy 
laws be harmonized throughout the EU by making it illegal to say anything 
remotely derogatory about any religion or any cult? What kind of government 
is it that deems it right to do what is bureaucratically expedient, however 
perverse and  regardless of the consequences to it's citizens? 

Secondly, the entire debate in the EU has focused almost exclusively on the 
economic arguments - are software patents good for EU business or not? The 
MEPs may have been persuaded that they are not - how fortunate! But what if 
they had been persuaded otherwise? What if circumstances were such that in 
all honesty people like us had been forced to concede the economic argument? 
(I have even been advised that when contacting my MEPs that I should stick to 
the economic case against software patents because that's all they'll 
understand or are ever likely to be persuaded by). Well excuse my 
exasperation but as I pointed out to Hartmut some time ago, there is the 
little matter of freedom of speech and freedom to engage in the arts and 
sciences - as set out in the E.U. Charter of Fundamental Human Rights, a 
document that the committees are obliged to take into account when 
considering legislation (by Rule 58). I would be interested to know if 
anybody can show me evidence that JURI and co. have fulfilled their 
obligations in this matter but I won't hold my breath. It seems outrageous to 
me that matters like these should be considered purely from an economic point 
of view. Would the same thing happen in a debate about ID cards or 
immigration law? If the average journalist cannot understand the wider issues 
because they don't really understand what software is anyway, they should 
damn well make the effort to find out - that's their job.   

Have these cretins any idea of the damage they were about to do by allowing, 
effectively, the patentability of maths - of ideas?  Do you remember the RSA 
encryption patent? Perhaps most people have it in their minds that it must 
have been something awfully complicated and clever. Well it was not - it is 
based on a lemma that is as simple as Pythagoras' theorem and much easier to 
prove. Or what about the Fast Hartley Transform? Patented by Bracewell in 
1987 (even though there was prior art going back 40 years), he was persuaded 
of his appalling mistake by his colleagues and never renewed it but you will 
be hard pressed to find an implementation of it in the mathematical software 
'literature' to this day as most people mistakenly assume it is still the 
subject of a patent. Bracewell may be forgiven for a slip which he seemed 
later to regret, though that slip may well have impeded slightly the progress 
of science. I will not say what I think of  Rivest, Shamir, Adleman and other 
rapacious and venal thieves who through motivations of greed cause others to 
have to check their wallets before deciding whether to continue their 
research in the direction their imagination has taken them.

Oh alright! - I did say what I thought of them ;-)

If the members of the press still cannot understand what is wrong with 
software patents and maybe find the examples I have given to be somewhat 
obscure and irrelevant, consider what might have happened if Einstein had not 
bothered to continue along his famous and historical line of thought and had 
stopped at the Special Theory of Relativity. After all - there was at the 
time no compelling physical necessity for the General Theory, and it might 
have been left undiscovered for many years. Until that is, a company 
researching a marvellous new satellite based system called G.P.S. discovers 
that in order to get the damn system to work, they need to modify the 
algorithms used in their devices in a rather strange but predictable and well 
described manner. A bright spark of an engineer at the company plays around 
with these algorithms until he manages to fit them into a general 
mathematical scheme, enabling him to generate the whole set of algorithms 
that might be needed by such devices. So the company patents the algorithms, 
and has, in it's relatively trivial quest for a new type of gadget, claimed 
ownership of one of the greatest scientific achievements of all time.

I almost wish it had really happened that way since it would surely have led 
to an academic and public outrage sufficient to ensure that no such patents 
would ever be allowed to darken humanity's door again.  

Regards, Paul.