 Software patents. So who is worried about software patents? Okay, who is not worried about software patents? Because the non-programmers can leave the room. I read, yes, that Microsoft had to pay 1.5 billion dollars for some patents on some maths, apparently, which is very interesting. In America, software patents have been a fact of life since about 1985. Small, first of all, and then Now, I think one million pending patents of which a large number have something to do with software. In Europe, it's still quite complex. So I want to explain today for the software developers here how software patents could affect you, how they exist legally, and what we as an association are doing about them. If you don't know who I am, I'm Peter Hinchins. I'm the president of the FFI. I We're an association in Europe and a bit further abroad that have been working against software patents and for open standards and for copyright for about seven years. We were founded in 1999 in Munich, and now we're in about 20 countries, a thousand members, and what we do is we try to help our politicians gently to define laws which work better for our industry, which is programmer software. I'm a free software developer. I've been writing software since I was about 17 actually, but that's a long time ago. I'm free software since 1991-92. What Europe has been doing basically is trying to imitate America, and I like the story of the the guy jumping off the very tall building and he's falling down, falling down. He's saying so far so good, so far so good, so far so good, and this is Europe with software patents. We have in each country fairly healthy approach to patents. When the European Patent Convention was built in the 70s, national parliaments decided quite carefully that software arts, maths were not inventions to be patented. These were creative works well covered by copyright. And this was what the European Patent Convention defined, and the national each country in Europe has is still this point of view. There was a case in the UK for example a few months ago where the High Court said look this is software, it can't be patented. It's still an enshrined notion. But the EPO, which is this patent office outside the EU, has been since 85 systematically changing the rules to allow patents on software. And it's a delicate process. It's taken them about 15 years and with five steps each time changing one thing, they come to the point where now if you take a program and go to Munich and say I want to patent this program, they'll give you a patent. And it's also business methods. It's on ways of selling drugs. It's on ways of doing things. And the EPO still thinks, you know, we should be like America, you know, Europe is, is like the poor cousin of the rich Americans and we should be like America. It's their dream, one million pending patents. The problem in America is that the system has gone completely crazy. It's falling apart. And the American economy isn't doing so well either. Europe is actually growing faster than the States and people are seriously starting to wonder whether the patent system isn't really one of the big problems in America. When you, I mean, who here likes Microsoft? Okay, it's a fair bet. They're a software company, but when they pay $1.5 billion because they've been selling some MP3 software and distributing it, I find that offensive. I don't care who they are. I find that a company like Lucent, who don't make any MP3 products, didn't invent it, didn't develop it, are really charging some of the tax for using mats. The effects of patenting, over patenting are, they're insidious. They stop people from doing things. It's not just in software. It's in health, for example, research into malaria, which is a disease that affects something like a hundred million people. And it's a really bad disease. The research into malaria is stopped, slowed down, blocked because some companies own patents on some of the malaria parasites. So if you research, you're actually violating a patent. You're using information, which is not public anymore. This is little by little turning what was, and what we expect to be, public, common goods. What we know, what we build, what we invent as a community, as a world, into private property in the name of profits. And the argument, it's a simple argument, it's a very childish argument, is that the market is always right and profits are always good. And anything you can sell and buy is a good thing. It makes money for someone. But this is it's very 1990s, you know, it's old. The example I give my wife is it's good to be able to own a house. That's nice. It means that you can be owner of your house. You can, you know, fix the roof and you won't get thrown out the next day by some landlord. But it would be really silly to sell off the streets. And some forms of property can be private, but some have to be shared. Otherwise, they, you know, the market we live in falls apart. Okay. So in Europe, you have a few large companies, mostly Microsoft, SAP, Siemens, Nokia, Philips, who have been pushing very aggressively over the last years for software patents and basically trying to find any avenue they can to get what they see as a, you know, an essential tool for business and what everyone else sees as a insanity. In 2005, the FFII fought and finished a very long battle. It began in about 2000 where there was an attempt to get a new directive through the parliament, which would have once and for all legalized software patents. This was a very a very divisive fight. It split the IT industry in two. You had a very visible, you know, fragmentation. Some companies really wanting software patents and some companies really against them. I think everyone, every individual programmer, every free software developer very clearly understood the dangers. We got a lot of support from politicians and we basically stopped the EPOs and I'd say big software plans in Europe at that point. So, of course, you know, this is not a simple game and with 15 years of developing software patents in Europe, there are many other ways of doing it. The current attempt, the current strategy, is to basically bypass the European Union, bypass parliament and build a new patent court, which would be outside Europe. So, in Europe, if you're the EPO, if you're a pro software patent specialist, usually people who buy and sell software patents in general, then if you look at the current situation, there's two big problems. One is these national courts, which don't like software patents and never have like them. The second is the European Parliament, which is proven that it's able to stand up to, you know, bullying and actually say, no, go away. So the big plan and the big danger right now is this new proposal, which would bypass the European Parliament and would bypass national courts. It's called the EPLA, you may have heard of it, the European Patent Litigation Agreement. And what this means, it's an agreement which would be signed by a number of countries, and it would basically say, when you have a patent lawsuit, you don't go to national court anymore. You go to this new court, which is very powerful and you can sue anyone in Europe for any amount of money for doing anything. It's lovely. It's a dream. What it would mean if the EPLA gets signed is that all the software patents which are sitting in the EPO, are kind of in a state of limbo. They've been granted, they've been examined, they've been not opposed, they've been paid for, they're valid in courts, they're valid at the global level, world patents, but they're not valid in Belgium, in France, in Germany, in the UK. They might be if you go to court and you really fight for them, but they're in limbo. And there are something like, I don't know, 100,000 of these patents. If the EPLA gets signed by, let's say, you know, a core group of European member countries, suddenly all of these patents become valid in those countries, and valid as in court. So it's a lovely setup. Of course it's not that simple. I mean, there are people who really despise the EPLA and find this an offensive thing. It's very anti-European for one thing. Now, I'm a European, I'm half Scottish, half Belgian, I live in Brussels. I kind of like that year of Europe because we Scots, we always felt like an oppressed minority. And when we're in Europe, there are so many oppressed minorities, we feel like a big happy family. So, you know, we've seen bad governments in the past. I think what's happening in Brussels isn't perfect, but I think it has a chance of being something quite good. And I would quite like to be, you know, one day when I'm 70 or 80, being a citizen of the United States of Europe, I think, with, you know, big macho political power. I think it could be fun. But, you know, it's actually going to be another 20, 30 years of chaos. And out of this will emerge a functioning parliament, a functioning, you know, two houses, a functioning legal system. And every step on the way is part of that. Now, something like EPLA is outside that. It's anti-European. It says, the European system doesn't work. We don't like the parliament. We don't like making laws by proper discussion and proper debate. We want to make our own laws completely outside any democratic process. And no, that's a bad thing. There's no way of fixing it. There's no way of getting it, you know, under control anymore. You know, if the parliament isn't doing a bad job, and we probe this last year, two years ago, you go to the parliament, you knock on doors, you tell MEPs, this law is a bad law. And they listen. MEPs have to, at some point, answer to their voters. And I think this is the cure for many bad laws is to get them into the public debate, get them into the, you know, the political arena where they can be discussed and looked at. So, our goal as FFII, my goal as president of this association, is to bring the discussion of patents into the public arena. It's been done very much under the table. I think, like many, many laws get passed or many legal changes get made by avoiding discussion. You know, all the experts get together and they agree on something, sign some documents, and suddenly there's a new law and no one knows about it. But patents aren't just some accessory thing. They're absolutely essential to our modern economy. Why, for example, can I, in Kenya, do a payment on my mobile phone, do a money transfer mobile phone, and why not in Europe? I mean, you know, Europe invented the GSM standard, so why can't we make it evolve? The reason is patents. It's so heavily patented. But there's almost no progress anymore. Just the licenses to get involved, like 110% of the cost. So, patents are actually affecting us in every single domain. And the question of how we fix the patent system has to be done, has to be answered by all of us, not by some experts in the room somewhere. So, we're launching three. We are, the process of launching or have launched three separate initiatives. This EPLA thing, which has been floated for the last couple of years, is basically causing a lot of confusion, anxiety. The German presidency is pushing it very hard. The French have their own proposal, and the Germans are saying, well, the French are not very important. We can lead them to have their election. And then when they're finished, we'll come back with our EPLA proposal, and SAP and Siemens are lobbying very hard. And the whole thing has got very stuck. The commission doesn't like EPLA. There's one thing called community patent, which is sitting there quietly. So, we have a couple of years, one year, two years to, you know, take some initiative. The first thing that we have done is set up a series of conferences, which we call the European Patent Conference. We had one in Munich last year, one in Brussels this year. We have one more in Brussels in May. And the goal is to get all of these, all the patent expert community, who are not all in favor of software patents. They are actually clever and understand that a system which lives for a long time has to be balanced and has to work and can't just take everything, has to give back as well. And to bring these people into an event, into a group where they can speak together, exchange information and come up with better ideas. So, these events will be taking place all year. And we're running them with a number of interesting partners. We had, last time we had on the same stage Greenpeace talking about patents on life and IBM explaining why patents and software were bad for open standards. So, it's interesting to see how large, even the largest patent holder, software patent holder, IBM can actually stand up publicly and say, look, there's a problem here. We depend on open standards and software patents make it impossible to make new open standards. So, what do we do? We're basically stuck. The first initiative we've done is start a new industry association. So, we noticed one thing which is FFII is mostly individuals, mostly where activists, where mostly software developers, people who have understood the problem, but there was never a real place for companies to get involved. And how many people here are involved in running a small company? Okay, so, like me, I run a small company because as a professional developer, it's fun to have a little business. If you want to find out, for example, as a small company, how you can get involved in the patent debate, how you can help or how you can get information, or even in the software domain, who represents you in Brussels? There's nobody. We have national associations here and there. There's no European associations. We've started one. It's a small market association, ESOMA. So, all of you, entrepreneurs can join us and ESOMA will basically help finance what FFII is doing, help us to lobby, organize events. The third thing that we are doing is, let me show you this. We're making posters. You can try to find these. I'll put a few boxes of these around the building and you can try and find them. Okay. You probably can't see this at the back. This is the campaign for ethical patents. Now, what is this? This is a popular demand for a patent system which actually works. Now, many people may think that the only good patent is a dead patent. We don't want any patents at all. But that's an argument which doesn't work. There are good reasons for a patent system. They're not very nice, but they're there. Basically, without patents, companies will not publish anything. Too many secrets and secrets are bad for collaborative research. So, the basic concept of a patent is you publish and you get a small monopoly. The problem is when the monopoly is 20 years long and vast. You know, I own MP3. That just doesn't work anymore. So, this campaign is designed to ask the question who does the patent system today discriminate against? Why is it bad for open standards, for free software, for small businesses, even for poor people? Why are medicines too expensive? And what do we need to do to fix that? There's a website, Ethipat, the campaign for ethical patents. Basically, we want a million signatures, 10 million, hey, a billion signatures. I don't mind, but they've got to be real signatures. And then we will push for a new patent directive in Europe, which will actually define once and for all how the patent system should work, how long a patent should last for, what can be patented, how much it costs, how it happens. So, the whole thing, which is now being defined by experts, I say experts. Because what they're very good at is defining systems which make them money and make their friends money. Not defining systems which help the common good. And ultimately, every law that we accept has to be a law which is good for all of us. Laws which are unjust and which are good for a few people and better for everybody else are unethical. I'll finish there and I'll take questions. Thank you very much. If I have 15 minutes every week to dedicate to the findings of the patent, what should I do within 15 minutes? That's a very good question. It's not enough 15 minutes. 15 minutes a day might be good. If you want to help right now, just from the buzzer of course then, go to the Ethic Pact site, try to understand the message and try to get some people to understand the message and spread it around. That's the first one. If you want to help with the patent fight, it is a complicated subject. Patents are the delicacies of good in the back and hard to understand. You have to read about it, research. Get involved. You have lots of email lists, lots of wikis, lots of places to get involved. The best thing to do at FYI is to find a local group, National Charter, who is in charge, contact them and say okay, when can I come and meet you? Maybe next month. Maybe try to keep in touch once in a couple of months. See what things are happening and discuss by email. That's the simplest. If you have too much money, make a donation. We're all volunteers. Money helps. For the rest, keep your ears up, keep involved, keep what's going on. The new organization that try to create to post the patent, who is that associated with it? Is it associated with the World Trade Organization? Where has it been created and what can be done about it? This new entity which is planned, called the European Patent Litigation Unit, that's the agreement. We created an entity called the European Patent Judiciary, which would basically run under the EPO. The European Patent Organization runs the European Patent Office. The European Patent Judiciary would appoint the judges, would basically define the law and also choose people who would then decide the law. For a fixed period of time, it's a completely corrupt concept. Basically, you define the law, you choose your judges, and you say if you only connect the law the way I want it, I fire you. This absolutely isn't my problem. Can we already join ESOMA? Yes. The website is esoma.org. There's a contact form. We launched this in January, so January 24, I think it was live, 15th February. It's a Belgian non-profit, so as they are physically in Belgium. And we are opening the doors today. This is the first public announcement of ESOMA, in fact. So you're basically fighting bandits. Well, when you want to justify your work, you have to have some examples. Some companies, some patents. What do you show? Like real examples. Real enemies. This is one of the problems. These 100,000 software patents sitting at the EPO are all abstract. They're all sitting there. No one quite knows what's happening to them. So all we have are the... It's like a wave, we have just the front of the wave. We definitely see in America the effect of software patents. We see the fact, for example, that software patents make it almost impossible to define new standards safely. So, for example, I'm working on a new standard called AMQP, which is a new standard for messaging middleware. It's for microphone communication between systems. We've been working on this for about three years. It's a large effort involving banks, software companies, Cisco, big companies. We cannot publish this without a risk that somebody has patented something in there. We don't know. So it's not the tangible direct damage. I mean, there are good cases. You definitely have cases like Blackberry, paying $600 million for seven patents. The American system is insane. People will tell you, well, the European system isn't that bad yet, which is true. So the European problem is still fairly abstract. So what we're mostly confronted by is an intellectual exercise. It's looking at what we have in America, looking at what's really in place in Europe, and then saying, okay, this is where we're going to be. Now, I've been involved in a very small number of ethnic issues in Europe, and they aren't real. Most of them don't come to court. In fact, it's very rare. The vast majority don't ever even go to litigation. They simply let us arrive, lawyers open the door, and companies say, what is this? What do you mean I'm infringing your patent? And then they say that they pay. This is a big problem. It's the information on the use of patents between companies for extortion. It's undocumented. There's no data on this. We don't know how many patents are used in Europe. We don't know how much effect they're having right now. So all we can do is extrapolate. And this is one of the difficulties of getting this debate. It really requires some paranoia and some idea that we're in a progression. And what's happening in five minutes time is important, but little's happening today. How much time do we have, sir? Five minutes. I just want to say to you that the patents really have problems for companies. I am working in a plastic injection molding machine fabric and we were attacked by a concurrent. He said, it is illegal. I have patented that we use ethernet in a plastic machinery as a protection of most. Okay, so we have to defend. Finally, it was declared as non-relevant, but you have to fear and you don't know whether you can sell in one year or two years the same machines. Thank you. So if you do have concrete cases, please let us know about it. We do lack data. As you say, it's about fear and it's about risk. And it's about, if you're a small company, how much risk can you afford to take? If you go into a new market and you know that somebody has a patent which hasn't even been defended, but that they're willing to bring out their lawyers, how much risk can you afford to take? And this is also a big difference between Europe and America. In America, risk is a part of life. And people actually, they positively seek risk in some cases. If you go to a venture capitalist and you say, you know, it's a very risky project and if you're more money, not less. But in Europe, you go to a capitalist and say, have you seen a project? They say, forget it, we don't like risk. So in the European context, any extra risk is very bad for small companies and very, you know, okay, for the larger ones. And this is part of the psychological game. When there are patents in an area, it scares off competition. It lets companies use bluff, which is, of course, not the basis for a market. There are 100,000 patents you are talking about. Are they publicly visible? Is there a database that they can query to see if my project potentially includes some of these patents? Hmm, good question. So we do have a website called Dallas which has been working to try to document, you know, which are the patents which are software patents. But it's a big problem with software patents. I mean, people don't say, I have patented a table. I'll take Eric Josephson's example here. They say, you know, a table with four legs. They say, I've patented a horizontal surface with a number of extrusions per choreo. That's an angle which may vary from 10 to 110 degrees, perpendicular to the surface, which may serve from anything from feet to coffee to plants. They have a patent on how a table can be made and how it can be sold. And this is a description, a legal document which is almost impossible to understand. So in fact, you don't know what's patented until you're sued, until someone says, this, in fact, is patented. I saw an example where somebody who had invented, I don't know, something very something like a remote control has now seen someone for electronic music distribution saying this is the same thing. And if you look at the patent description, it could plausibly overlap. So a good patent lawyer, a person who makes your patent for you, will make a software patent as any patent, in fact, as broad and as vague and as fuzzy as possible. And there's no pressure on the claimant to make quality patents on rapid progress. So for us, the conclusion right now is these software patents may not become legal instruments. They must be kept out of the market, period. When it's a better system, we could possibly allow some kind of a claim on some aspects of the work. So, very, very, very well controlled. Okay, that's all for now. I'll be around for a little while, so if you have questions, come with me afterwards. Thank you very much.