If Haydn had patented “a symphony, characterised by that sound is produced [ in extended sonata form ]“, Mozart would have been in trouble.

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”.

This is bad news for all of us. While I don’t agree with the “it’s the end of the world” position that nosoftwarepatents.com seems to take, I strongly oppose software patents and this directive is one of the many reasons why I think that politicians should be held a lot more accountable for what they do.

After losing the vote in the European parliament, the pro-patent lobby, now tries to undermine democratic process by adopting the directive without having the parliament vote on it. Now… that’s an interesting take on democracy. They also watered down the language, so that in a plain-text reading it seems to prohibit software patents, but when read applying judicial definitions it does not. That kind of behavior flies in the face of everything that a united Europe should stand for.

Patents on information technologies should not be allowed because of economic reasons, philosophical reasons and above all because they have not been allowed until today and nobody made a strong argument for doing so now.

This is another good example, by the way, for the things that happen when you allow the other side to dominate the discussion’s context. (Everybody who had a real-life talk with me in the last three weeks is bound to know a few things about this ;-) ). Software patents have never been permitted in Germany or in the EU. Why the hell are we now arguing for outlawing them (again!) instead of the proponents arguing for them? Because the pro-patent lobby was allowed to set the context. So now everyone in the legislative body believes that software patents would be great for SMBs, ignoring the fact that most of the protest against software patents comes exactly from that group.

Software patents are a broken concept. Do you want to know more? Start here: FFII, they make a more convincing argument than nosoftwarepatents.com.

if you cross path with Jacek Rutkowski. He starts a smearing campaign of the highest order. What's the worst part? He's indexed by Google News, who obviously regards this dumbfuck as a valid news site. Here's a question for all you information scientists out there? What does that do to your credibility? Today? Tomorrow? I fully support Russell and his family in this. (via John Battelle's SearchBlog via Dave Winer).

Powerful first-hand account on reporting an incident in Iraq: Open letter to the devil dogs of the 3.1 (via Scoble). Must read.

Weblogging got mentioned on NBC's The West Wing. A senior white house official (Josh Lyman) jeopadizes the President's agenda for alternative fuels by causing an accident with a fuel-guzzling SUV, hitting, unfortunately, a brand-new hybrid car. A weblogger's car, who subsequently gets online to weblog about his accident. Lyman calls him and gets into a rather personal rant, which, of course, also gets weblogged right away, presumably showing a lack of ethics on the webloggers part.

Dave commented on it, referring to Michael Gartenberg who said <quote>"He's subsequently informed that "these people aren't journalists...", implying that a journalist would be "bound" by his off the record comment and not write about it and a blogger would simply ignore it (and did ignore it)."</quote> (please read the full post for context).

The "webloggers vs. journalists" debate gets to a point where people already assume the same arguments behind every move "the other side" makes (in this case: webloggers lack professionalism).

1. The weblogger informs Lyman right away on the phone that he's weblogging as they're speaking (shows some ethics, doesn't it?) even though Lyman said this was "off the record".
2. The biggest argument for the statement that webloggers aren't journalists is that they don't care about access. If a white house reporter had been the target of the "off the record"-rant (which was personal and abusive), she couldn't have reported on it. Why? Because she needs the access to do her job and more importantly, not reporting on it might have earned her political capital. The weblogger was involved in a car accident with a senior democratic white house official, ironically driving a Hummer. He weblogged it. That's what we do. You can't bargain with someone who only has 15 minutes of fame.

You can spin the whole thing so it makes webloggers look bad. We can spin it, too. Especially within the context of yesterday's show, I think weblogging was portrayed exactly as it should be: Independent, up-to-date, honest journalism.

and do something new and you can bet that there's a guy 'round the corner who just waits to hack your guestbook :-). Now, of course, nobody will have the balls to draw something anymore before they code up their own bitmap rasterizer...

This took much too long... but the new site is online. I spent the last month working on multiple projects and didn't have time to work on anything else. Now I just have to test trackback and comment functionality.

It's also already out of date :-(. Mark Pilgrim decided to discontinue his weblog. You will be missed.