Bonum Certa Men Certa

Newly-elected UK Government Hopes to Imitate the United States With Software Patents

Theresa May and David Cameron
Photo of Prime Minister David Cameron and Home Secretary Theresa May (taken by ukhomeoffice)



Summary: The British Prime Minister threatens not only software developers in the UK but in Europe at large now that some charlatans want to open the whole of Europe to US-style patent law

IN yesterday's audiocast Tim and I spoke about the misguided new plan of the government, which seems to be thinking the advancement will be improved or restored in Britain by having more patents and bureaucracy. One of the issues that few outlets have covered is software patents. The Guardian, a leading UK publication that recently sold out to Bill Gates [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] wrote about Cameron's day with the big G:



Not at all: software patents are defensive, and they're often a problem for startup companies, which may find themselves threatened by bigger ones which, being bigger, have been able to build them. They're a blight, and British startups are much better off without them. A senior insider at another big internet company mused to me afterwards: "It sounds like the minister has been nobbled. We'll have to un-nobble him."


TechRadar, another British Web site, wrote the following:

Now, it seems, we're going to review our laws to make them more Google-friendly – including, it seems, our patent laws. The prospect of US-style software patents is a chilling one, with big firms using them to stifle competition and patent trolls effectively running legal extortion rackets.

This post on the patent mayhem surrounding Android should give you an idea of how crazy the US system has become.

Thirdly, there's the involvement of Facebook and Google. There's something disturbing about seeing the two online giants so close to government, because our government appears particularly bad at getting them to stick to the law.


British lawyers rejoice over at IAM, which is a site/publication that always promotes their interests. "UK government wants to make it easier to obain software patents" says the headline (yes, with a typo), but the article requires a subscription for one to read.

The FSFE's Karsten has just paraphrased Dr. Glyn Moody (a Brit) as saying at FSCONS that software patents "cost US economy 4bn USD 1996-1999, added value of just 100 million USD. Just serve to secure incumbents" (this was stated over the weekend).

The British government must listen to its own people and not multinational corporations. Theresa May still remembers my long conversation with her (my grandfather told me this when he met her in July) and the politicians she is surrounded by are mostly technophobes, so they would believe anything that any company with lobbyists may tell them (this includes Google, which does not accept Moody's sob story). This is a recipe for disaster and further loss of power to those who are already in power. Software patents are fences, therefore they impede new entrants like Google used to be and no longer is. Falk Metzler, a German patent attorney, can already be seen using language tricks to say that "Computer Program Claim not Excluded from Patentability under the EPC":

The referral claimed a divergence between decisions T 1173/97 (Computer program product/IBM), placing the emphasis on the function of the computer program rather than the manner in which it is claimed (e.g. as computer program, computer program product, or computer-implemented method), and T 424/03 (Clipboard formats I/MICROSOFT), which placed emphasis on the manner in which the computer program was claimed. Following the reasoning of the latter decision, only a claim of the form "computer program for method 'X'" could possibly be excluded from patentability as a computer program as such, whereas claims of the form "computer implemented method 'X'" or "computer program product storing executable code for method 'X'" would not be excluded, irrespective of the nature of the method 'X'.


As a quick reminder, software patents may come to Europe through case laws in Britain (Symbian) and in Germany (Microsoft and Siemens), so this is important for the continent at large, especially now that Barnier et al. push for centralisation [1, 2, 3].

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

Good News, Bad News: Groklaw is Back Online, SoylentNews Apparently Loses Editor
Jan ought to change the resignation into a mere pause
Microsoft's CEO is Hyping Up 'AI' (Plagiarism) to Distract From Falling Interest in It and Missed Expectations (Investors Run Out of Patience as Reality Does Not Meet or Match Early False Promises)
Microsoft clearly needs 1) a distraction and 2) hype about "AI"
No, Microsoft, Plagiarism is Not "AI"
"Satya Nadella says as much as 30% of Microsoft code is written by AI"
Microsoft Has Become Almost Extinct in Web Servers, Netcraft Now Ranks It in Only One Category (Microsoft Down Sharply), Deranked/Outranked in All the Rest
Microsoft used to be in all categories, now it's in just one
Microsoft Has Hundred of Layoffs Again, Same Week as the Company's Fake Results
those people were in effect Microsoft employees, just classified as contractors
Sirius Open Source in Court
I personally was a witness and an alibi
What GNU/Linux Means to Us
Linux without freedom is like becoming a vegetarian "except on special occasions"
 
Techrights Statement: The Solution is Not More Censorship or Moving to Another Mastodon Instance, the Core Problem is Social Control Media Including Mastodon
Censorship typically leads to additional (new) issues
Manchester Computing Centre (MCC) Made the First GNU/Linux Distro, But You Probably Never Heard of It
People like Owen are barely remembered, not because they didn't do valuable work but because they didn't suck up to "The Establishment"
Online Mobs and Crabs: Doing to Fabrice Bellard What They Did to Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds
They just don't want skilled people to be productive
E-mail is Not HTML, Web Pages Aren't a Form of E-mail
as an associate remains us, always use "plain text, it was good enough for Shakespeare"
Slopwatch: Stigma-Baiting by the Serial Sloppers and Latest Garbage From the Slopfarm LinuxSecurity.com (Also Slopping Away at "OpenBSD" With SEO SPAM Made by LLMs)
Microsoft et al are trying to profit from blurring away information
Links 02/05/2025: Mineral Selloff and Chinese Sanctions
Links for the day
Gemini Links 02/05/2025: Hens and Tmux
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, May 01, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, May 01, 2025
Gopher/Gemini Links 01/05/2025: Slop/LLM Bot Troubles and Driving Angry
Links for the day
Links 01/05/2025: Apple Lies to Courts, European Patents Thrown Out by British Courts Again
Links for the day
Gemini Links 01/05/2025: Small Web and Going Offline
Links for the day
Links 01/05/2025: Slop Blowback, Social Control Media as Vehicle of "Sextortion"
Links for the day
Disinformation and Marketing Spam From and For OIN (GAFAM's and IBM's Weapon Against Free Software Activists and Reformists Against Software Patents)
All in all, this anniversary is just a PR stunt with revisionism
Some of the Evidence We'll Be Relying Upon in the Lawsuits Against Matthew J. Garrett
Finally facing the consequences for his actions
Symptom or Hallmark of Ponzi Schemes: Microsoft Says It Gains Over 100 Million Dollars in "Goodwill" and Its Speculative "Value" Nearly Doubled to $119,329,000,000 in the Past Year Alone
Total liabilities are now over $240,000,000,000
Gemini Links 01/05/2025: Trying OpenBSD and Usenet Reborn Released
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, April 30, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, April 30, 2025
Gemini Turns 6 Soon, Still Growing
Will we see 3,050 before Gemini turns 6 in summer?
Richard Stallman Re-Confirmed by the Free Software Foundation
as expected
Links 30/04/2025: Pakistan-India Tensions Grow, Facebook Banning Publishers Before Elections
Links for the day
Links 30/04/2025: Censorship in the Guise/Clothing of "Combatting Deepfakes", Mass Surveillance Increasingly Framed as Catchphrase "AI"
Links for the day
Why Techrights Attracts SLAPPs From American Microsofters Who Literally Strangle Women and Rely on the Most Unscrupulous Law Firms
"the SLAPPs targeted at TR [Techrights] shows that Orwell was right: Journalism is about exposure, everything else are PubRels."
The Problem at the Open Source Initiative (OSI) Is Vastly Bigger Than Its Rigged Elections
Elections and election-rigging at the OSI are a symptom
IBM Allegedly to Sell More Parts of the Company While Outsourcing to India, Microsoft Now Goes After Unions
They both have cash and debt problems
Slopwatch: Google Noise ("News"), Linux Security (Slopfarm), and BetaNoise (Serial Slopper)
Today there's no lack of LLM slop
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, April 29, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, April 29, 2025
Links 30/04/2025: "Brian Lumley’s Necroscope Series" and "Death In The Afternoon"
Links for the day