Tobias Schlitt - a passion for php

My friend Zak remindes us, that this topic is still dangerous, so keep eyes and ears open! The devil is not banned, yet...

Via Jan Wildeboer and FFII:

Strasbourg, 6 July 2005 -- The European Parliament today decided by a large majority of 648 votes to reject the directive "on the patentability of computer implemented inventions", also known as the software patent 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 take the will of the European Parliament and national parliaments into account. The FFII congratulates the European Parliament on its clear "No" to bad legislative proposals and procedures.

This is a great victory for those who have campaigned to ensure that European innovation and competitiveness is protected from monopolisation of software functionalities and business methods. It marks the end of an attempt by the European Commission and governmental patent officials to impose detrimental and legally questionable practises of the European Patent Office (EPO) on the member states. However the questions created by this practise remain unsolved. FFII believes that the Parliament's work, in particular the 21 cross-party compromise amendments, can provide a good basis on which future solutions, both at the national and European level, can build.

Jonas Maebe, FFII Board Member, comments on the outcome of today's vote:

This result clearly shows that thorough analysis, genuinely concerned citizens and factual information have more impact than free ice-cream, boatloads of hired lobbyists and outsourcing threats. I hope this turn of events can give some people faith again in the European decision making process. I also hope that it will encourage the Council and Commission to emulate the European Parliament to improve transparency and the ability of stakeholders to participate in the decision-making process irrespective of their size.

Hartmut Pilch, president of FFII, explains why FFII supported the move for rejection in its voting recommendations:

In recent days, the big holders of EPO-granted software patents and their MEPs, who had previously been campaigning for the Council's "Common Position", joined the call for rejection of the directive because it became clear that the 21 cross-party amendments championned by Rhoitová, Buzek, Rocard and Duff were very likely to be adopted by the Parliament. It was well noticeable that support for these amendments or a substantial part thereof was becoming the mainstream opinion in all political groups. Yet there would not have been much of a point in such a vote. We rather agree to the assessment of the situation as given by Othmar Karas MEP in the Plenary yesterday: a No was the only logical answer to the unconstructive attitude and legally questionable manuevers of the Commission and Council, by which this so-called Common Position had come about in the first place.

The FFII also wishes to thank all those people who have taken the time to contact their representatives either by email, phone or in person. We also want to thank the numerous volunteers who have given so generously of their time and energy. This is your victory as well as the Parliament's.

A great victory in a huge war. Thanks to all you anti-sorftware-patent-activists!

Quoting Aleksander Farstad, CEO of eZ Systems:

"As a company, we have made an official decision to be against software
patents - they go against our principles of openness, sharing and innovation
and have a strong potential to harm our business.

• to defend ourselves against nonsense patent litigation
• license multiple patents
• register and defend a significant patent portfolio."

Thanks a lot to eZ systems for supporting the fight against software patents in Europe!

I recently updated my anti software patents demo page (see here) in respect to the newest incidents.

Brussels, wednesday 19th Jan 2005 -- The EU Software Patent Directive has been or will be scheduled on the agenda of the Agriculture and Fishery Meeting of the 24th of January as an A item, i.e. an item that is to be adopted without a vote. This was announced today by officials of the European Commission and of the EU Council Presidency at various meetings. The entry is not on the official meeting calendar yet.

This text is now used in the demo page (instead of the appeal I used last time). Thanks for putting a page like that in front of your entry page to protest against software patents. You can download the actualized version here.

Find more about the actual situation and software patents in general.

Later this week, on November 25th and 26th, the EU Competitiveness Council will convene and soon attempt to formally adopt a proposed "Directive on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions", commonly referred to as the "software patent directive". On May 18th, the Council reached political agreement on a draft legislation, however, did not take a formal decision to adopt it.

We urge the governments of the EU member states, which are represented in the EU Council, to oppose the debateless adoption of the said proposal as a so-called "A item". In the interest of Europe, such a deceptive, dangerous and democratically illegitimate proposal must not become the Common Position of the member states.

That's the original text of the announcement of Linus, Michael and Rasmus, which I pratly stole to quickly setup a protest webpage for the following 2 days. All entries for my website (main, blog & gallery) now show that page by default. If anyone likes to, please just download it and upload it to your website. It should more or less work with any PHP driven site (using index.php as the index page).

In best hope for the next days...

Appeal to the EU Council by

23 November 2004

From the appeal:

...
We urge the governments of the EU member states, which are represented
in the EU Council, to oppose the debateless adoption of the said proposal
as a so-called "A item". In the interest of Europe, such a deceptive,
dangerous and democratically illegitimate proposal must not become the
Common Position of the member states.
...

Read more here.

As recently announcend in the reasons for a judgement from may the 19th this year, a German jury ratified the rights of the GPL (GNU Public License). In the specific instance the netfilter/iptables project sued Sitecom (a router producer) to us the software for their products, without keeping all aspects of the GPL. The result of this was the enforcement of an injunction which disallows the distribution of the routers under this circumstances in Germany.

The jury disagreed, that the GPL represents a complete set aside of copyrights and affirmed the GPL in general. The described reason for judgement is a huge world wide success for open source in general, stated the advocate of the iptables project, since it is the first judgement which officially approves the properties and enforceablity of the GPL.

In the meantime the router producer offers another new product using the implied software. The projects advocate has applied for a penalty of 10000,- € at the jury for the violation of the injunction.

More detailed information (German) can be found on the Heise newsticker. Currently there is no news source in English language known.

I recently got an article on Golem to know, where my current company (the research division) warns against software patents. I really did not expect that, but I really appreciate.

(Sorry, the artile is in German language.)

Here is the original paper, in Englisch.

Today I received my copy of the german Ct magazine (magazine for computer technic), which has a 1 page article on the Linuxtag (see page 48, issue 15/2004). The article is focused half onto Linuxtag itself and the other half is focused on our demonstration. Best thing: In the middle of the page there's a photo of the 10 jailed programmers, where I'm in the very middle! ;)

Nice to see that Heise (publisher of Ct and the famouse Heise newsticker) has brought up that issue, also they did not post any newsticker article on that. Hope the whole software patent discussion gets more and more to the center of public media (and hopefully beside the geek media).

As promised, Spiegel-Online published an article about our demonstration on thursday.

Read more...

P.S.: Yippieh! I'm famous! ;)

I found a nice photo of our demonstration.

Thursday (24th of June 2004), at Linuxtag in Karlsruhe, will be a demonstration against the European software patents, which passed the European parlament a short while ago. Everybody: Stand up and join as in Karlsruhe!

On this website the FFII shows, why a simple online shop is currently patented in europe and expresses again, why software patents have to be regulated (IMHO they should even be frobidden!).