Converting FOSDEM Talk on Software Patents in Europe Into Formats That Work for "FOS" and Don't Have Software Patent Traps
Watch Mr. Henrion's talk (4 minutes long)
Yesterday afternoon we shared the latest FOSDEM talk by Benjamin Henrion (FFII). He spoke about the illegal kangaroo courts associated with the corrupt EPO, where cokeheads break the rules and grant illegal patents, later to be assessed by unconstitutional courts that are run by the private industry instead of proper, national courts. It's really as disgraceful as that sounds. It must be corrected. The sooner, the better.
"FOSDEM's lightning talk does not have a working WebM version," an associate has since noted about Benjamin Henrion's short talk (segment). "The MPEG4 version is loaded with software patents, including for AAC."
"Worse," he said, "Wikipedia asserts that patented codecs are open. See sidebar: ISO/IEC 13818-7, ISO/IEC 14496-3 [...] Open format? Yes [...] Free format? No -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Audio_Coding"
There's nothing open or free about MPEG4 (never mind AAC or not). It's proprietary and laden with software patents/bear traps that ought not exist in the first place. Worse yet, it's connected to actual patent trolls!
A transcoded version of the video is now available in WebM format.
Here's the transcript:
[00:00] Hello, my name is Benjamin Henrion. I'm from Belgium. I've been attending all the FOSDEM since it exists when it was called OSSDem. And I work on software patents since 1998. I'm president of a association which fought the software patent directive 20 years ago. And this directive was rejected by the European Parliament because large companies saw the Parliament could vote a lot that they didn't like. So they pushed
[00:30] they asked a member of Parliament to drop this directive and push for the central patent court in 2005. In 2006, the commission proposed a reform of the patent system to centralize the the patent system in Europe and notably to remove national courts. So the law is the European patent convention. It's an international law between several member states of the EU plus some other states like Turkey.
[01:00] The law says article 52.2 is computer programs are excluded of patentability but the next article says they are to be considered as such. And the EPO since the 1980s grants software patents anyhow using this as such loophole. In 2006, my predecessor Mr. Pillish predicted what would happen. So in July 2005, after several attempts to legalize software patents in Europe, the patent establishment changed strategy instead of explicitly
[01:30] seeking to sanction the patentability of software. They are now seeking to create a central patent court for Europe which would establish and enforce patentability rules in their favor without any possibility of correction by competing courts or democratically elected legislatures. The last sentence is very important because the whole game here is to avoid the European court of justice and basically the European Parliament said it's fine so they are not legislators anymore. The unified patent court is a very strange beast
[02:00] where they invented they created new judges without a law degree called technical judges and those it appears that those judges are in fact patent lawyers who work for Nokia in the morning and become judges in the afternoon. It's self-financed before it was financed by the EU but now it's self-financed was very, very expensive to go there to litigate or to be sued there. The EPC is not EU law so the European Court of Justice doesn't have a say
[02:30] and basically they are blocking the appeals to the European Court of Justice on those questions. Now what we discovered by litigating against it is that in the past the European Court of Justice killed the previous attempt because national courts cannot be removed of EU law and in 2017 there was a case with investment courts that had to improve EU law and the Court of Justice killed them because it's an infringement of Article 267.
[03:00] Now in October there's a company a streaming company called Roku that tried to escalate this question of EU law to the European Court of Justice and the UPC denied the questions saying there was no issue while all the experts say there is and actually it's a violation of EU law Article 277.3 where courts are forced they must escalate the questions of EU law and so in the past there was a famous case with Poland
[03:30] where the European Commission gave a heavy fine heavy daily fine to Poland for exactly the same problem. Now we know the European Commission is not in this file is not disclosing their eyes and the question is whether someone can go to national court and try to escalate the problem to the European Court of Justice by changing the validity not of the UPC treaty but of the Brussels one regulation with contains the fake word of common court
[04:00] so in for investment courts that's what they killed. So it's going to be my project for this year. Thank you.
I'm told that the text is "worth analyzing", but that's a topic for another day. Henrion's words stand on their own. This time around. █