06.15.20
Posted in Europe, Patents at 10:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Young and restless, working into the night if not during the night for almost no financial gain
Summary: The EPO doesn’t seek to attract valuable workers anymore; this assures self-destructive outcomes, which IAM helps the EPO deny
THE European Patent Office (EPO) hardly advertises jobs anymore. When it does, it's truly unbelievable how little they pay new workers; no wonder they cannot attract any talent anymore. The pay is low and apparently the world's worst among international organisations.
“It’s quite a racket, but nobody is doing anything to stop this.”So while granting more patents than ever — including loads of bogus ones such as software patents — the staff is rewarded less and less. Piles of money are stacked up in the EPO’s coffers, only to be enjoyed or stolen by António Campinos, Benoît Battistelli and their cohorts, who gamble this money away. It’s quite a racket, but nobody is doing anything to stop this.
Of course the EPO has enough money in the bank to let staff have a few months off (paid leave), but will it do that? Of course not! SUEPO has just explained what it’s like for people who relocated — along with family — to Dutch/German residency on a 5-year EPO contract (time limits are probationary and contribute to stress):
Use of Flexible Parental Leave
The Staff Representation welcomes any measure to help parents cope with the lockdown. Last 18th of April, almost one month after the closure of the Dutch schools, management made flexible parental leave available. This measure aims at supporting staff with (primary) school age children or younger, facing hardship during this unprecedented and extraordinary situation.
However, it is worth having a closer look at the typical parents who are mentioned in the publication “Help for parents with young children”. These are in majority relatively young colleagues in the lowest grade of their job groups, possibly hired on a 5-year contract. They typically have lower salaries, (large) monthly mortgage payments, and pay for the crèche, which in the Netherlands costs around 1900 euros/month.
How can those colleagues meet their financial obligations if they have to make systematic use of parental leave? Evidently, the impact may be different depending on the conditions of employment and grade, but it is clear that young families are particularly vulnerable under these circumstances that no one expected. These colleagues have no true safety net; they might find themselves broke-down.
The situation is so exceptional that even conventional ways of coping with tough times cannot be applied. Grandparents are
a risk group; other family members are also living in a similar lockdown.
Colleagues with young children in lockdown cannot perform as the others. They are in a very different situation than colleagues with grown-up children, or without children. They are faced with little choice, either they don’t produce and they bear the consequences, or they pay for it by taking parental leave.
On top of these financial consequences, colleagues who normally rely on parental leave to cover their children’s school holidays and who used a large number of them during the crisis may no longer be able to face future needs.
This is a clear case where the principle of “Substantive equality” endorsed by the EPO1, applies: “[...] the perception that treating all people in the same way is not sufficient to achieve genuine equality.“.
Although any measure to help parents is welcome, the use of parental leave is not an adjusted tool to deal with these exceptional circumstances. Civil servants, such as EPO employees are, from different European countries or other IO’s have been granted with Special Leave with full salary, and such an instrument should be put in place urgently.2
________
1 Inclusion policy for people with disabilities; definition
of “Substantive equality”, see [...]
2 See also [...]
When staff is treated this badly, the quality of the hires won’t be high and therefore the quality of patents will suffer as well, irrespective of quotas or “targets”. This is how institutions die. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Europe, Law, Patents at 9:44 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Like a ‘third world’ country, Germany decides to attempt something which it very well knows to be illegal as well as unconstitutional, severely harming the reputation of the EU in the process (not only Germany’s)
THIS is a quick highlight of an issue that’s not likely to be mentioned in the corporate media, only in blogs controlled by Team UPC. We’ve mentioned this before, expressing the view that a constitutional crisis is likely imminent in Germany because its “Ministry of Justice” actively works to undermine justice.
“Why they’re willing to put themselves in such an embarrassing position can only be explained by asserting that lobbyists control this government.”The following statement was issued yesterday by Benjamin Henrion, bearing the headline “Brexit: FFII rejects the proposal by the German Ministry of Justice to present the Agreement on the Unified Patent Court (UPCA) to the German Parliament for ratification” (“AETR” is brought up again):
The United Kingdom has ratified the UPC Agreement, and unless a formal request is sent by the UK government to the Council of the EU expressing its decision to undo the earlier ratification of the UK of the UPCA, the UK must still be considered a Contracting Party to the UPCA.
This means that the German Federal Ministry of Justice is proposing to the German Parliament, the ratification of an agreement with a “third state” of the European Union. In view of case law “AETR”, 22/70 of the Court of Justice, EU Member States may not enter into obligations with “third states” which affect European Union rules.
[...]
In view of Article 31 of the Vienna Convention (1969) on the law of the Treaties, a Treaty shall be interpreted in good faith in accordance with the ordinary meaning to be given to the terms of the treaty in their context and in the light of its object and purpose.
This means that the UPCA must be read as it is written, and a likely witdrawal of the UK can not result in an interpretation of how UPCA may be interpreted if the UK would no longer be there.
This means:
1) that the Federal Republic of Germany may not (in view of case law “AETR” of the CJEU) ratify the UPCA, as long as the status of the UK, as ratifying party of UPCA, has not been clarified.
2) In view of Article 31 of the Vienna Convention on the law of the Treaties, the German Government may not present UPCA for ratification to the German Parliament with an interpretation of how the UPCA would be interpreted if the UK would no longer be party to it.
Presenting a Treaty for ratification to the German Parliament with an interpretation of how the UPCA will be interpreted if the UK is no longer participating, is clearly violating the spirit of the Vienna Convention on the Law of the Treaties.
There’s also this new press release, “Unitary Patent: Germany is ignoring Brexit, European law, its Constitutional Court and Italians” (we covered this last week) and to quote:
The German government is pushing for a second vote on the Unitary Patent at the Bundestag. By signing an internal treaty with the UK as signatory, Germany is ignoring Brexit, and will violate EU law. The government has resorted to a very creative interpretation of the agreement in order to ignore the Brexit problem, showing its dedication to see the UPC agreement entering into force ‘whatever it takes’, at the risks of alienating Italy, with an automatic relocation of the UPC court from London to Paris instead of Milan. With the German Presidency starting in a few weeks, Germany risks to undermine [sic] the functioning the European Union.
[...]
If Germany ignores all those problems and push the ‘ignore’ button on all this issues, there will be second constitutional complaint filed immediatly. [sic]
Concerned people should trigger a debate in each national parliament and ask their politicians to request a debate in the Council of Ministers, in the European Parliament, and in each and every parliament in Europe, asking for a legal opinion of their legal service, like the European Parliament did in 2007 with the resolution on EPLA.
Germany’s government is only doing something shoddy here; it’s self-harming and it’s unlikely to let the UPCA through. Why they’re willing to put themselves in such an embarrassing position can only be explained by asserting that lobbyists control this government. █
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Posted in Free/Libre Software at 6:24 pm by Guest Editorial Team
By figosdev
Summary: “If you have ever created a programming language specification before coding the actual language, then you’ve already written code for a language that doesn’t exist yet.”
Funny thing about the Free Software movement — while many of us care about Free Culture as well, it’s taken ages for the FSF to recognise its legitimacy.
The position of rms in the past (and likely the present) is that while software is a “practical” work — this point has relevance for copyright eligibility (software was not even copyrightable in the United States until 1980) other “non-software” works are not practical in this sense — they don’t “do stuff.”
“While rms has given some support to free licenses for other works (game assets for free games being one example) this division is sometimes considered less important by advocates of free culture.”Code describes computer instructions — and other works do not. While rms has given some support to free licenses for other works (game assets for free games being one example) this division is sometimes considered less important by advocates of free culture.
My own opinion — and this is quite sincere, because I think some might interpret it as sarcasm or being cynical — is that the brain is a sophisticated, self-rewiring biological computer, and culture helps to alter our programming as much as psychotropic drugs or traumatic experiences do. This idea that “culture is software too” isn’t something I invented, but it’s the way I’ve felt for many years.
There are simple programming languages and there are esoteric programming languages, but just today I wrote a simple — rhetorical programming language to make this point:
# % turn on/off printing
# @ quit program
# a, A cycle colour backwards
# b, B cycle colour
# c, C copy next variable value to following character variable
# d, D move down most recent variable value
# e, E toggle print default upper/lower (starts lower)
# f, F move to 1, 1
# g, G get next character variable value
# h, H append next variable value to following character variable
# i, I set next variable to empty string
# j, J fi
# k, K if most recent variable value is true, do the following
# l, L move left most recent variable value
# m, M convert most recent value to uppercase
# n, N convert most recent value to lowercase
# o, O set next variable to 0
# p, P print most recent variable value
# q, Q exit loop early (limited)
# r, R move right most recent variable value
# s, S turn off print default case
# t, T set next variable to random number 0 to 99
# u, U move up most recent variable value
# v, V set next letter to following character
# w, W loop most recent variable value times
# x, X mark end of loop
# y, Y wait next value seconds
# z, Z clear screen
Behold, a language!
Plato once defined man as a “featherless biped” — the response from Diogenes was to pluck a chicken for Plato and say “Behold, a man!” In this spirit, I have named this programming language Diogenes. Having written it, there seems to be a text-searching app of the same name. Not that I expect this language to catch on.
“Not that I expect this language to catch on.”Diogenes compiles verbatim-copying-only essays by Richard Stallman into non-free software. The only thing that makes this software non-free, is that the source code (the essays) are non-free. Therefore if the essays were free, the resulting program code would be as well. I know this isn’t really very clever, but I did start laughing when I had coded most of the functions.
I like Logo, and I like languages inspired by Logo, so I wanted Diogenes to have some very basic Logo functionality. You can move up, down, left, right — it draws as you move, you can cycle forwards or backwards with 8 colours including black, you can write a Hello World program, set, clear and append variables, and it has a conditional, loop and limited loop breaking function.
“%” toggles print output, “@” quits the program, and the rest of the commands are single letters. So for example, if we want to create a nice Hello World program, VAH sets the Variable A to H, and P prints the most recent variable set:
vahp
Will print h. We can cycle the colours with “b”, we can set a variable to an empty string with “i”, so by the time we have this little program:
%bbvahpbvaepbvalpbvalpbvaopibap vawpbvaopbvarpbvalpbbvadp
This compiles to about 120 lines of Python code, and when you run it it looks like this:
If we take the text of the recent essay, “Saying No to unjust computing even once is help” and we only use the body of the essay from “A misunderstanding” to “awareness of the issue”, this essay is the first “program” ever compiled with Diogenes. Given that each letter is a command, it compiles to 16 KLOC and the output, while minimal, looks like this:
“The Right to Read,” from the headline and byline to “one of its central aims” compiles to 29 KLOC of Python, and the output looks like this:
If we remove 352 spaces of indentation from the last dozen lines or so, they look like this:
if locolour < 0: locolour = 7
colour(locolour, 0)
xy(locx, locy, locolour)
for loop747 in range(figure('r', vars, 'n')):
if locx > 0: locx -= 1
xy(locx, locy, locolour)
locolour -= 1
if locolour < 0: locolour = 7
colour(locolour, 0)
vars['r'] = ''
lutog = 0
colour(7, 0)
This is compiled from code that Stallman wrote, where he said “central aims”. Those two words alone are not copyrightable, so we can compile that much of the essay for this article. The loop variable is named “loop747″ because it is the 747th loop in the program, compiled from the letter “l” (for “move left”).
You probably don’t want to say that unintentionally writing non-free program code is unethical, when the author isn’t aware that it’s program code. But if anything can be program code, where do we draw the line? The fact is, this language compiles non-free works into software that I’m not free to publish. If you think that’s a joke, look up “de minimis” and the 1990s Supreme Court decision on sampling music.
For me to publish the program I compiled today as free software would be impossible; it certainly uses too much of the source essay to be protected by a “fair use” argument — and you could almost certainly “decompile” the source back into all or most of the essay.
“The line between written work and program code is probably thinner than most free software advocates would like to admit.”Stallman’s essays were not written for a computer to run, but for a person to put in their mind — what they do with it is largely up to the person. On the other hand, POW camps have used forced written and forced spoken confessions in part to get the prisoners to convince themselves that they are guilty of the crimes they are accused of. The line between written work and program code is probably thinner than most free software advocates would like to admit.
Like with “real” software, you can “scan” this writing and it may not “run” in your own mind. You may find it is simply incompatible with your environment and setup. I’ve written plenty of things that did not convince the audience of anything at all. Maybe it was just too much work to “port” to their platform, or they decided to reject part of it and put the rest in mental quarantine.
All the same, these essays will compile to program code. If you have ever created a programming language specification before coding the actual language, then you’ve already written code for a language that doesn’t exist yet. If we are all doing that, hopefully these programs can be released under a free license before they are turned into code — or at least after someone turns them into code.
“If you have ever created a programming language specification before coding the actual language, then you’ve already written code for a language that doesn’t exist yet.”How would that work?
Some of the arguments made here are a little bit silly, though they are still inspired by a serious argument — our culture needs to be free-as-in-freedom.
YOU WILL NOW CONCEDE THAT WORKS OF OPINION ARE ACTUALLY PROGRAM SOURCE AND SHOULD BE FREE.
Hey, it was worth a try.
Long live rms, and appthis = vars['a'] \n vars['p'] = app(vars['p'], appthis) \n if togprint: print lu(vars['p'], lutog) \n sleep(figure('h', vars, 'n')) \n locolour -= 1 \n if locolour < 0: locolour = 7 \n colour(locolour, 0) \n copythis = vars['k'] \n vars['i'] = copythis \n if type(vars['i']) == str: vars['i'] = vars['i'].lower() █
Licence: Creative Commons CC0 1.0 (public domain)
Permalink
Send this to a friend
Content is available under CC-BY-SA