November 23^rd, 2004

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.