(Non-Europeans may vote; the poll closes November 11. -- Seth)
Fighting software patents
net.wars
By Wendy M. Grossman: Saturday 05 November 2005, 07:31
THERE'S only a week left voting closes November 11 to vote for the EV50 top Europeans of the Year (http://www.ev50.com/). This year, as The INQ reported in late September (http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=26408), the nominees for Campaigner of the Year include Florian Mueller, the driving force behind NoSoftwarePatents (http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/).
Actually, though, there are a couple of other EV50 nominees you can vote for if you want to send a message opposing software patents. Michel Rocard (nominated for MEP of the year) was the European Parliament's rapporteur on this topic, and José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero (nominated for Statesman of the Year) represented the only government to vote against the software patents proposal in the European Council. Finally, Dalia Grybauskaite, up for Commissioner of the Year, is the only one in her category that NoSoftwarePatents describes as "a safe choice".
NoSoftwarePatents does have this handy voting guide (http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/en/m/ev50/vote.html), though most of its other recommendations are, it says, randomly generated. (You cannot, apparently, vote in only the categories that interest you; for your vote to count you have to vote in all of them; seems sort of silly to me, since it guarantees that anyone who's only interested in one subject will choose people they know nothing about in all the other categories.) You vote separately for European of the Year, which is chosen from all 50 nominees.
That an anti-software patents campaigner should be nominated for an award won by the late Pope is a pretty extraordinary thing. In the US, when software patents were first mooted, you saw programmers testifying sedately in front of government officials in locations around the country; in Europe we're seeing people protesting in the streets.
The software patents issue is an important fork in the road for US-Europe trade relations. It's not entirely surprising that it should be more controversial in Europe, given that most of the biggest software companies are American. If you regard software patents as creating artificial monopolies, then the logic is perfectly clear: allowing software patents will transfer an increasing amount of economic control to entities with no allegiance to Europe at all.
Of course, it's arguable that they haven't got all that much allegiance to the US either; multinational megacorporations tend to behave as though they were nations in their own right. Although unlike nation states, they do not have to worry about taking care of the unemployed. It seems entirely possible that we are on the verge of a split in the computer industry that will mirror the existing situation in the television industry. In the US, television is dominated by commercial interests; what public service broadcasters there are must fight for every dollar they get in funding. In Europe, while public broadcasters do not necessarily dominate, they are far more substantial forces. In the UK in particular, even after a decade or two of changes and cutbacks the BBC casts a long shadow over all of broadcasting.
If you think of open source software as computing's equivalent of public service broadcasting, it's easy to think that Europe will embrace open source as both the City of Munich (14,000 desktops) (http://news.zdnet.co.uk/software/linuxunix/0,39020390,39216394,00.htm) and the NHS (800,000 desktops) (http://hardware.silicon.com/desktops/0,39024645,39117233,00.htm) are trying to do while most of the US remains wedded to commercial software, whether that's licensed, as now, or provided as an online service as per Microsoft's Live.com announcement this week (http://www.forbes.com/newsletter/2005/11/04/microsoft-google-yahoo-mr_1104bo...). People sometimes suggest that open source is at a disadvantage because users don't have an easy path to technical support; in the litigious US, the bigger deterrent to its adoption may be uncertainty over whom to sue. Whatever happens in Europe, software patents, which will almost certainly continue to be granted in the US despite calls to reform the US patent system, could provide some interesting weapons for a trade war.
But that's all somewhat distant speculation. At the moment, things are looking promising for the opponents of software patents, and although Florian Mueller is by no means the only or longest-serving of these, he is the most visible, and the hope is clearly that securing him and the other nominees highly publicized awards will send a distinct message to the EU.
It will not be enough by itself. If there's one thing we know after ten years of public policy surrounding the Internet, it's that even if software patents fail now in Europe the issue will not go away. There are many avenues software patent proponents can take. They can continue to lobby for the passage of the Computer-Implemented Inventions Directive, being squabbled over in the Council and in the European Parliament. They can lobby the national governments of EU member states to get the dissenters to change their policies. And, in a bout of policy laundering, they can push for cross-recognition, so that the US automatically respects EU-issued patents and, more importantly, vice-versa.
The people who want software patents will continue trying for them via all these avenues, and any others they can find. Companies like IBM, Microsoft, and Siemens are not going to suddenly abandon trying to replicate the strategy that has proved lucrative for them in the US. This battle has a long way to go yet. µ
Wendy M. Grossmans Web site has an extensive archive of her books, articles, and music (http://www.pelicancrossing.net/), and an archive of all the earlier columns in this series (http://www.pelicancrossing.net/nwcols.htm). She has an intermittent blog (http://www.livejournal.com/~wendyg). Readers are welcome to post there or to send email, but please turn off HTML.