Bonum Certa Men Certa

Growing Threats of Software Patents in Europe and the FRAND Trap Which Microsoft Promotes/Lobbies For

And Microsoft told us it "loves Linux"...

EU lobbying



Summary: Microsoft's lobbying against Android in Europe and for FRAND (essentially software patents) in European standards yield results

Software patents in Europe have been covered here for much longer than the EPO. Companies like Microsoft were using them to effectively ban Free/Open Source software (FOSS), or exclude such software from procurement policy as per the standards. According to this new article from Dr. Glyn Moody, Microsoft was somewhat successful with this as its lobbyists continue lobbying for FRAND in Europe [1, 2]. Yes, in addition to lobbying the European Commission for many years against FOSS/Android [1, 2, 3], eventually leading to antitrust action against Google, "Just as Microsoft is adopting open source, the EU is excluding it from policy - like Microsoft originally demanded," to quote Simon Phipps, who in turn cites Moody who's saying: "It's no surprise that the Commission was trying to keep that particular detail quiet, because FRAND licensing—the acronym stands for "fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory"—is incompatible with open source, which will therefore find itself excluded from much of the EU's grand new Digital Single Market strategy. That's hardly a "balanced IPR policy."



"An inherent problem with this policy is that it wrongly assumes that patents on software have legitimacy in the EU.""The problem for open source is that standard licensing can be perfectly fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory, but would nonetheless be impossible for open source code to implement. Typically, FRAND licensing requires a per-copy payment, but for free software, which can be shared any number of times, there's no way to keep tabs on just how many copies are out there. Even if the per-copy payment is tiny, it's still a licensing requirement that open source code cannot meet."

An inherent problem with this policy is that it wrongly assumes that patents on software have legitimacy in the EU. It's a loophole or even a distortion of European law. Well, it's not as though Microsoft truly tries to obey the law anyway... its front group, Business Software Alliance, has pursued this kind of policy for nearly a decade now.

"Well, it's not as though Microsoft truly tries to obey the law anyway..."Incidentally, yesterday IP Kat published this article about "Patentability of user interface designs", citing the Board of Appeal which isn't particularly software patents-friendly (unlike the EPO, it doesn't just seek to maximise profit by reducing patent quality or by also expanding patent scope over time, in defiance of the EPC*).

One comment from the FFII's President said: "Jacob said the "Technical" wording is a restatement of the same problem. "Technical" becomes the black hole where the EPO finds it way to bypass the spirit of the EPC, where all the exclusions concerns abstract matters."

"“Technical” is generally a rather meaningless term."One person responded by saying: "have you bothered to read the post? It explains how, on the contrary, the BoA of the EPO has refused to see anything "technical" in presentations of information, except in three now rather old cases (T 643/00, T 928/03 and T 49/04). Apart from that, I know for one thing that T 49/04 was an extremely controversial decision within the EPO, and this may explain why, afterwards, the Boards didn't continue on the same path."

Here we have a wilfully ignorant person who doesn't know the correlation between the UPC and software patents (high-profile people have spoken explicitly about it) and s/he says "conspiracy" to discredit those who speak about it, shooting the messengers as follows:

If "Zoobab" is the same Zoobab as on Twitter, s/he seems to be an anti-software-patent activist and appears to be a loyal follower of the Techrights blog, who see anything that even mentions software patents or the UPC (even in a negative context) as evidence of some sort of grand conspiracy to defraud the European public.

As it happens, I'm dubious about the merits of software patents or indeed the UPC. But I've learned that anything less than full, wholehearted agreement with the wacky conspiracy theories of such characters is seen as yet further evidence that there's not only a conspiracy, but also that you're part of it, even if you broadly share their misgivings albeit for different reasons.


The above puts words in the mouth of both Benjamin Henrion and myself -- words that were never at all uttered. In spite of the secrecy which breeds suspicion**, there is a lot of information one can accumulate by digging deep enough. There is actually plenty of evidence to show what we both said (not the above), the EPO's management keeps promoting both the UPC*** and software patents (we wrote about it with examples earlier this year), and this got the attention of other people last night. “Technical” is generally a rather meaningless term (like "innovative", "novel" and other such buzzwords). A toilet bowl too is technical. See this reaction to the phrase "the effect of a particular layout on the mental processes of the user could be considered... technical" (response in Spanish). ______ * “Customer”, apparently, based on this new tweet, is a new word for “applicant” as EPO inherits the ENA mentality of Battistelli.

** The EPO has once again (second time in a week) promoted the EUIPO. Recall the overlaps between those two [1, 2, 3]].

*** Here is the latest UPC promotion from the EPO (last night).

Recent Techrights' Posts

Techrights Does Not Compete With LLM Slop, It Exposes the Bastards, Plagiarists and Scammers Who Do That
People like Scam Altman, still facing a lawsuit from his own sister for sexual abuse against her
Slopwatch: Planet Ubuntu Became LLM Slop and Some People Fail to See the Immorality of Plagiarism
it lessens the incentive for people to publish real articles
Microsoft Layoffs Again in Bay Area
Microsoft relies on people's false belief that being "in LinkedIn" will get you a job; well, seems like even working inside LinkedIn really sucks and you lose the job
 
The "AI" (Slop) Bubble Already Popped, But It's Not an Overnight Collapse
where Microsoft put its money
No More Steven Astorino at IBM, Chatter About Weekly/Nonstop Layoffs at IBM
What happened? Good luck guessing.
Looking at Corruption in Europe, Going Beyond the EPO
Expect a new series to kick off very soon
Slopwatch: Security SPAM and LLM Slop for SEO and FUD Purposes, Perpetually Tarnishing the Perception of Linux and (Open)SSH Security
A lot of this Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt (FUD) comes from Microsoft and its LLMs
Links 30/05/2025: Google's LLM Slop Pushers Are Killing Journalism and Shira Perlmutter Fails to Stop Bribed Regime From Legalising Plagiarism (in "AI" Clothing)
Links for the day
Links 30/05/2025: Offline Arts and "Threshold of Patience"
Links for the day
Signing Off Serious Lies With a Statement of Truth is No Joking Matter
It's not hard to see what's happening here
Links 30/05/2025: LLM Slop Already Ingests and Vomits Its Own Garbage, Facebook Exec Admits Copyrights a Concern Too
Links for the day
Mass Layoffs at Microsoft Result in More Whistleblowers From Microsoft
Microsoft's predatory pricing is further
EPO Poll: 68% Dissatisfied With Quality of Slop (Wrongly Framed as "AI") for Patent Classification
Slop does not work, it's just falsely advertised with extra hype (funded by slop pushers that sponsor the major media)
Big Crowds Gather to Learn About Software Freedom From the Man Who Started GNU/Linux in 1983
"It was a great success"
Gemini Links 30/05/2025: Fighting Against the Bad News, and Slop is Dehumanisation Disguised as "Intelligence"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, May 29, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, May 29, 2025
Links 29/05/2025: Chinese Cracking Against EU Institutions (Prague), More Assaults on Media and Its Funding Sources
Links for the day
EPO Workers Caution That the Officials Are Still Illegally Trying to Replace Staff With Slop (to Lower Quality and Validity of European Patents)
Nobody in Europe voted for any of this
Links 29/05/2025: US Health Deficit and Malware Disguised as Slop Generator
Links for the day
Links 29/05/2025: Turtle Roadkill, Modern 'Tech' as a Sting
Links for the day
Thanks for All the Fish, Linux Format
people who once wrote for it (or for other magazines) comment on the importance of this news
People's Understanding of the History of GNU/Linux is Changing
RMS is not a radical, he's just clever enough to see and foresee what's going on
Microsofters Were Scheming to Take Over This Entire Web Site (in Their Own Words!)
Money gets spent censoring/deplatforming people who speak about real issues; no money gets spent actually tackling those underlying issues
Bicycles for the Minds and the Story Harrison Bergeron
"The goal of having people in charge of the tools they use and that the tools should amplify ability" has long been abandoned
Links 29/05/2025: YouTube Problem and Giant Privacy Hole in Microsoft OneDrive
Links for the day
[Video] Cory Doctorow Explains DMCA: DRM in the Browser (or Webapp) Will "Make It a Felony to Protect Your Privacy While You Use It."
Pycon US Keynote Speaker Cory Doctorow
United States Courts With Sworn Testimonies Are on Our Side, We'll Present the Same Here
Chronicling what happened is a moral imperative
Serial Sloppers Ruin and Lessen the Incentive to Cover "Linux"
The Serial Sloppers (SSs) ought to be named and shamed, but almost nobody does this
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, May 28, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, May 28, 2025
Links 28/05/2025: 'Emulation Layers' (Measurements and Linguistics), Libraries, and Discomfort
Links for the day
Links 28/05/2025: More Arrests for Bitcoin-Connected Torture and Prosecutions for Dieselgate-Linked Executives
Links for the day
Even Microsoft (MSN) Covers Richard Stallman's Public Talk in Milan 2 Days Ago
He spoke in Spanish earlier this month (Alicante)
Gemini Links 28/05/2025: Techo-authoritarianism With Slop Plagiarism and "No Online June" (Going Offline)
Links for the day
Links 28/05/2025: GitHub MCP Exploited and MathWorks Discovers Huge Windows TCO
Links for the day
Very High Attendance Level at Richard Stallman's Talk Shows People Can Relate to His Message
Smear campaigns have their limits
Gemini Links 28/05/2025: Celsius-Fahrenheit, Endless Scrolling/Infinite Scrolling, and Trapping LLM Slop Bots
Links for the day
Prison gate backdrop to baptism by Fr Sean O'Connell, St Paul's, Coburg
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
More Photos From This Week's Milan Talk by Richard Stallman
The posts are in Italian, not English
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, May 27, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, May 27, 2025