Karsten on Free Software

At TACD’s Brussels conference, we’ve had an interesting panel that recounted the campaing about software patents in Europe. The panel consisted of the liberal EU parliamentarian Sharon Bowles, who is also a patent lawyer; the (not very) covert Microsoft activist Jonathan Zuck; and Florian Müller nosoftwarepatents.com

While there were a lot of the old arguments tossed about, there were some interesting points. Sharon Bowles made a rather daring point when she said that “I never knew a single patent attorney who wanted [american style software patents]”. To her mind, there’s an area that shouldn’t be covered by patents, but as she presumably didn’t feel like it, she couldn’t define that. Defining it would cause great “collateral damage” to the “electronics industry”.

All speakers feigned to be blissfully unaware that software is protected by copyright, and that this does not seem to have harmed the industry so far. Some more far-out claims were that software patents would somehow be an answer to the problem of illicit copying of proprietary software. Mind you, this is not your local coffee-house chat. These people are experts in their field. It’s probably best to see any such mistakes as intentional.

A more interesting argument came from Jonathan Zuck, who says that his organisation represents about 3000 small and medium enterprises (try joining, it’s free and they don’t vote). When I mentioned that software protection happens via copyright, he added that software is also protected by trade secrets. But trade secrets are becoming less feasible due to concerns about interoperability, state sovereignty.

Though minor, this is a point we might want to prepare ourselves to run into more frequently in the future. He didn’t answer to my question about how large a percentage the five largest funders of his organisation contribute.

Sharon was kind enough to give a hint for those aspiring to have something patented. Since it’s already impossible for patent lawyers to do a reasonably good clearance of prior art – i.e. to check that the invention doesn’t already exist – she recommends that you should just apply for a patent and let the reviewers do the checking. According to her, that is the cheapest way to do it.

The ensuing discussion reached a charming conclusion when a German physicist got up and spoke rather passionately about how stupid the idea of patenting software is, since it amounts to patenting mathematic formulae. Though rather new to the debate, he hit the core point: It really *is* a stupid idea to patent mathematic formulae. Period.

For those who read German, Stefan Krempl of heise.de is reporting from this conference. (Thanks, Markus)