Aehso’s Output

Just back from the Saving Europe from Software Patents: Why and How seminar, held in the European Parliament Office in Dublin this morning. I thought I’d give you all a quick report.

Ciaran O’Riordan’s summary of what happened in Brussels when the CCID was being debated was interesting. He talked mostly of how little MEPs understand about both software and patenting in general. it would appear they spent a significant amount of their time explaining what the directive meant.
The next critical EU directive in this area is IPRED2 - The second Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement Directive (PDF) (FSF Europe’s analysis here). The main goal of this directive is to criminalise intellectual property infringement. The impact on the software development is nicely summarized by this ZDNet article:

There are two main implications of this directive to free and open source software. Firstly, if a free software developer is found to have infringed intellectual property in the code he has written, he could be subject to criminal charges and may not be granted legal aid to defend himself. Developers of proprietary software in commercial settings would be less affected, as the company they work for would generally be held accountable rather than the individual developer.

I don’t think I need to explain any more.
The second speaker, Gareth Bowker, illustrated how software patents would inhibit network security. If the network security guys cannot use network analysis tools (nmap etc) because of software patent restrictions then their ability to counter threats from crackers who do illegally use them will be severely limited. Insteresting, I hadn’t thought of that.
An ISA representative made an attempt to explain why the ISA had supported the CIID and then reiterated their belief that patents were a good thing. To a less than convinced audience I might add, but sure God loves a trier. The panel were asked (by me) if they were surprised that an “Irish Software Association” was supporting the CIID, given the grassroots and SME opposition to the directive in Ireland. They indicated that at the time they didn’t have the time to look into the ISA’ s position but that they might in the future look at ISA’s membership more closely.
A Microsoft attendee questioned the future of the European software industry without software patents, citing the apparent imminent arrival of hoards of Chinese software companies who will destroy us all if we (and our multinational overlords) have no patents to protect ourselves. The panel politely pointed out to him that Chinese software companies are just as entitled to obtain European software patents as the rest of us and they could use them to against the European software industry (if they were enforceable).
An attendee from Google Ireland commented that copyright protection provided more protection to software development than is available in many other creative industries. He strongly asserted that software patents are not required. You know, it is very to like Google more when they articluate positions like this, especially when put side-by-side with the common Microsoft/IBM position.
Two representatives of the Department of Enterprise, Trade and Employment made some comments in an attempt to try clarify the role of the European Patent Office in all of this. (The European Patent Office, despite it’s name, is not a European Union institution - it was established by the European Patent Convention) I’m not sure how much they clarified things but they did raise the interesting issue of how the EU and EPO related to each other.
Poor Proinsias didn’t make it - he was stuck in Brussels somewhere.