 settle down class thank you so much today is the third in a series of lectures on the software patents in Europe hi David hi mom so Bill Gates he gets like an invitation from the Vatican saying we want to make you an honorary cardinal and he's really he's really pleased and he flies in his jets all the way to Rome and comes in to see the the Pope and the Pope is there mr. big mr. Gates mr. Gates coming coming so Bill is really happy you know he's like finally I'm recognized the Pope is like windows has been so good for the church so good for the church they want to give you this award windows yeah so Bill is like so what are you using are using XP or young to Vista no no no they don't use windows they use Linux you know Ubuntu very nice so Bill's kind of confused he's like so why am I here the Pope is like well I explained you know the Catholic Church Vesal paradise Vesal redemption but people they don't believe in heaven unless they know there's a real hell out there yeah and this is the year you know everyone keeps saying it was going to be 2000 big breakthrough 2001 the year on the desktop 2005 6 7 this year windows is gonna succeed on the desktop it's true finally anyway this talk is about software patents not Microsoft and I'm going to first of all explain where we are in Europe then I'll explain a little bit the conflicts that we see in a broader sense I'll take a specific example which is the no XML and OXML fight at ISO which is related to software patents and I'll talk about open standards a little bit more generally and then I'll explain the pattern system in a kind of a broader sense so you understand where it's coming from and then something new which will bring will take in at the end so software patents in Europe are actually not allowed if you ask the EPO ask the Commission they'll say we do not allow patents on software this has been their policy for the last I don't know how long they only allow patents on things which software does which is of course the same and this is the fact facing European software developers and companies using software making software is that if you go to the patent office and try and get a patent on software they will refuse but if you're a lawyer who's good at this you'll get one and it's really the lawyers against the engineers in this case now there was a big battle in 2005 the directive which was basically kicked out through the work of many many people it was the biggest the most lobbied directive ever in parliament and it was the moment that I got involved in this discussion because I'm a programmer I mean what do I care about patents situation in Europe hasn't really changed a lot since then the European patent office which is outside the EU grants software patents by the thousands you want one you get one there's a slight inefficiency and actually applying them to the market I you know suing people is not as good as it could be and so there is a move to create a big central European court which would enforce software patents for once and for all this happened in America about 15 years ago and they made a court called the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit CAFC and CAFC basically said if you can program it you can patent it anything you can patent we will defend and they were really really pro patent court which has turned software into the number one litigation area in America this is what is planned for Europe obviously it's a bad thing and this this plan was called EPLA now EPLA is actually dead we've been told the European Patent Litigation Agreement there is however a son of EPLA called EU EPLA which is still alive and this is really about who in Europe controls the patent system is it run by this EPO outside the EU is it run from Brussels as the court in Luxembourg is it unique a lot of fussing and fighting over money and power but no one really questioning this ideology that software patents are a great thing for innovation which of course is insane to anyone in the room here unless someone here from the EPO but I don't think so so Europe situation is that there is still a large political push to put into place a good solid software patent regime like we have in America of course in America it's also kind of falling apart so there's a good interest in delaying the process as long as we can so we get the American example to disprove the European theory political theory okay you will have noticed that the that the European the EU countries signed Lisbon Treaty recently which is a constitution basically and the Lisbon Treaty gives new powers to the Commission and Council and this is also part of the push to get patent system installed it gives the the Council the right to sign treaties and there is a danger that the EU will try to join the European Patent Convention become a signatory body of that okay this gets very political don't worry about the details the meat of the matter is that there are people like FII working on this and if you like politics and if you like to get into really complex arcane issues of whether this article Lisbon Treaty allows or excludes the right of the European Commission to join when I come and come and speak to us it really bores me to tears so what I like is a good fight people in my association know this nice discussion on free BSD and conflict resolution well when we look at the political process what we look for and what we are really interested by our conflicts the way we work as a I think political hackers what we look for our conflicts which are in place which happen which evolve and then we try to exploit those and the theory is quite simple if you're in a world where there's a change and as we are looking at a big change from industrial to digital then conflicts emerge and those conflicts big slow sometimes very very aggressive they can be infiltrated they can be understood they can be hacked and they can be turned into useful constructive processes so I'll explain a few of the big conflicts that we have going on right now in Europe with respect to the pattern system well the first conflict is between the EU and the EPO it's a very big very bitter conflict over money and power basically the European pattern office was set up before the European community had any kind of a strength as a temporary place to put patterns like we'll keep them there for a few years just in case of course this temporary place became very powerful got money got you know its own its own purpose began to lobby for its own existence and by the time the EU got any kind of a strength EPO was a permanent institution defining laws which affected the EU of course the European bodies the Commission for example they really hate that so the Commission is out to get the EPO anyway they can that's very useful that's a very good useful conflict which we we try to get involved in and try to use another conflict which we see is a conflict between patents and standards especially open standards this is also an emerging conflict there's a kind of ideology and in Commission that all standards are patented because what they see are the big telecom standards they see standards produced by Siemens and Phillips and Nokia and they're all patented up to the hilt what they don't see are the internet standards because they're basically invisible to people at Commission and yet these are becoming much much more important than the proprietary patented standards I liked the example of email versus GSM GSM is a very widespread standard patented but email is much much more important globally the number of people number of businesses built on email the number of layers that are built on top of that far exceed anything built on GSM and it shows that a really open standard is much more powerful tool for economic growth than the patent standard so there's a an emerging conflict between the patent systems ideology of you know we promote innovation and we you know give a reward for investment and the reality the reality of the of the economy developing on open standards and so we're seeing for the first time a politicization of the debate around open standards which is quite new we're seeing people actually lobbying very hard to get the government the European governments to define open as being open and patented so that when then they choose open standards they will also choose open and patented standards which is of course meaningless there's a conflict a very big conflict in America less in Europe between the IT industries and the pharmaceutical industries over patents and now in America patents are much more litigious they cause many more lawsuits than in Europe still because of the central court and if you look at all the lawsuits on patents there's a nice site called troll tracker which looks at patent lawsuits the top lawsuits are always on software and software is the software industry in America is being sued to death basically and that's really annoying them I mean you know constant persistent lawsuits from trolls on on stupid patents which are granted and enforced and so the IT industry goes to Washington and tries to lobby for a better patent law and they face this very strong very professional opposition from the pharma industry who do not want any kind of a weakening of the patent system for them it's a holy you know it's like Serbia and Kosovo and and Kosovo is you know software in Serbia is the pharma industry and so this is attempt to break free in America which is failing that the IT industry cannot lobby their idiots they go into the lift and they're arguing amongst themselves over you know what what does open mean and free software and they're fighting they go towards the the congressman and they're still arguing about some some some random stuff and the pharma guys are there with their briefcases and their money and their lawyers and they just wipe out the IT industry but this is an emerging fight between IT and pharma and we also like to look at this and try to exploit it in some way anything which weakens the patent system is very useful and then I guess free software and open source has really moved up when when I began in this discussion three four years ago when you talk to a politician about the importance of free software didn't believe you there was there was like your hackers your minority your niche you're not relevant and we'd say no no free software is a really important economic economically valuable technology it's a way of producing much more value it creates jobs it creates businesses it creates everything you like everything which is good for you and the politicians would be like I don't believe you literally well today that's no longer the case today if you go to the commission talk about open source and free software they understand what it means and the reason is very simple big companies have moved their infrastructure wholesale onto free software open source really my clients are for example big banks and their whole backend infrastructure runs online Apache free software open source it's fast it's cheap it's reliable it's better everything and the importance of free software as a enabling technology for your piece Europe's economy is becoming very very important so when you can say patents break that that's now a very strong argument which wasn't there a few years ago so these are the conflicts that we look at we try to exploit and bring up so our general theory of conflict is that conflict produces new structures and we try to be there and help instructors evolve when I'll give you an example of one particular fight that we've been in so ffi I okay association of volunteers around Europe and we work on many domains and we've been working in Brussels for the last I guess year more less on Microsoft's attempt to standardize its OXML format it's a very interesting example for many reasons it shows first of all who is not aware of this of this of this process who is who is here ignorant of the ISO and Microsoft no XML hands up okay so your neighbors explained because like three of you in a room next week we're going to Geneva to actually watch this ballot resolution meeting Microsoft had decided that they want their standards to be open and ISO international and the reason is that they are being I guess they see the the wave coming wiped out by governments who want open standards in their purchasing in their own systems when they buy they want to have a choice and they want open standards so like the Dutch you know give the Dutch a clap because they have now voted in government overwhelmingly to you know endorse open standards use ODF free software open source as a platform of their of their infrastructure and Microsoft are really scared by that so they want to be able to say yeah well ODF is open standards will so is OXML ODF is ISO so is OXML you know play that game and they're losing this game which is very nice the campaign that we started so basically this guy here Benjamin Orient was one of the unsung heroes of this revolution he began a website called no XML which began to it has a petition and began to spread the you know the simple logic that why this push for the standard was a bogus push I think we have like 82,000 signatories on the petition from all across the world and it's serving as a hub of a community which involves companies open open office activists standards activists intellectuals developers across the whole world who share information and who are convincing national bodies to not let this thing go through this thing being Microsoft's proprietary format that they want to declare ISO and the development of the no XML campaign is something I'll come back to later on in this discussion it's a very interesting model for building a community which is politically aware and can actually execute some kind of a constructive action the Microsoft is being faced by a commoditization of their infrastructure and open standards are the key to that it used to be that governments didn't really worry whether their documents were in format a format b they worried about the cost of the software they worried about the versions of the software it's become now you know it's hitting governments well if I accept a format that's owned by a company I have to pay them more money so just from the dollar side I want choice at that point so Microsoft is trying to get not just 0xml but the series of their standards is about five or six coming up pushed through ISO to get the ISO label and say we are a de facto we are not de facto we are a desuria legal international standard you can use us safely and so a lot of our work is to deconstruct this argument and show why it's a bogus argument because it sounds plausible governments don't think very much they take usually easy choices so one of our projects has been to set up a new organization called digital standards organization digistan and you can look at the website but the wifi is kind of poor here but you can try digistan.org and the goal is to actually explain and promote what a real open standard is once and for all and you'll find many definitions on the internet of open standard open standards are standards with reference implementations with blah blah blah so I made a simple and short canonical theoretical explanation of this based on the theory that standards are about captain capturing markets the reason why people companies invest in standards because they're good for business a little company like mine will invest in standards because we see a market growing that we can sell services to so we see standards as the tool for making markets very nice companies like well Phillips and Siemens and Nokia in the past and Microsoft see standards as ways of capturing markets so a good example would be the blue ray HD DV DVD fight it's about who owns the future of movies on this who gets the licensing royalties from that market who owns the market so the motivation for larger businesses is to own capture markets and you can basically then turn around and say well an open standard is one that actually resists being captured it's a bit like free software resists being captured if a standard is designed properly if the process designed properly that it can actually resist being captured by vendors all the way up its chain then it can be open is that simple so now if you look at something like ODF you'll see in fact it's slightly captive you'll see that there are a few companies which have a lot of influence in its design which is a problem ODF is not perfect it's owned by some people who don't give enough access to the process but we can improve that you look at OXML it's completely captive it's owned by one company no one here in this room can submit changes to OXML no one can fork it no one can you know improve it only one company can therefore it's a hundred percent captive and therefore it's zero percent open and the fact that it's published means nothing at all that's a precondition for open it's not a sufficient condition so looking at the concept of vendor capture vendor capture is a powerful tool for deconstructing a lot of the propaganda around open standards and when you're talking about open standards to people and explaining why they're important and why government should you know choose open standards think in terms of and speak in terms of vendor capture it's a very very powerful tool which cuts away a lot of the bullshit that we hear the bullshit that's amazing it's it's endless it's like for example yes but choice is good so Microsoft have a they have a pro-choice campaign pro-choice we want two standards let us choose more standards let's have three standards let's have four standards it's good for choice which is completely bogus yeah so we do the same with the patent system as well we deconstruct the patent system language the patent system is very it's actually very old and the arguments around it are also very old I remember reading an article which was discussing the debate in 1830 1840 and it's just the same debate as today it's very funny Switzerland was called a pirate nation in 1830 because they had no patent system and because they just you know they copied the French dye manufacturing industry and they didn't pay their royalties and they were pirates and this word pirate comes you know it's 150 years old and the patent system actually dates from a time when economy was a kind of religious thing you know this before Adam Smith and it's a bit like creationism you know it's the we think something and we will then tell you with great force why this is true but we don't actually analyze or use any kind of scientific approach patents emerge from the brains of people who do not understand economics and patents are anti-capitalist they're anti- free market and they're actually a protectionist device and in the 18 in the 19th century there was a big fight between the patent system and free trade economists and the patent system was abolished in many countries in Europe and then there was a depression in Europe and it was brought back in along with trade barriers and protectionism so when when when you hear the patent system being talked about as a tool for innovation it's a tool for protectionism it's the same kind of innovation that gave the Russians shoe factories which produced crap shoes the same innovation that you know gave the political theory where you close your borders to promote your own businesses it doesn't work it's complete failure protectionism does not create innovation innovation comes from competition free market this is Adam Smith's basic theory this needs to be accurate so one of the games we plays to turn around the patent systems language on itself so for example the patent system talks about invention and inventor which is great fun and we promote invention we promote inventors and they have these inventors days where they you know inventor of the year so in we say well an inventor is a patent agent and an invention is a patent that sits an invention is not actually a working device like the little you've got to see this is so cute this charger here that's that's not an invention that's just a product right an invention is a bit of paper that says you can't sell that product that's what the patent is patent says no I own the right to sell a wind-up charger in green that's my idea I own it I bought it from the patent system hey that's an invention and an inventor is a guy who writes bits of papers he's a patent lawyer patent attorney he's not an engineer an innovation is not actually making new products innovation is making new kinds of patents this is very important so you know you have like a copycat would be a company which makes new products and doesn't bother to patent them it's insulting when you listen to patent system rhetoric when you speak to patent experts you can also use these these deconstructive techniques on them and it just it messes with their minds you know it's great fun and it is the way it does inventions are patents not products so in Europe today what we're seeing is the emergence of these different conflicts I talked about so we have open standards becoming more and more important we have free software open source becoming more and more important becoming politically important not just in our you know for us this was obvious in 91 90 it's now obvious to mainstream we see people actually accepting that little companies in Europe don't need patents wow this is it's mind-boggling it just goes against all the ideology but it's actually the way it is so what's the next step you know where do we go as a community how do we now you know make something happen what do we do this is very difficult because we don't actually have a clear fight today that we can go and engage in this is also why we're we're working on the oxml standard issue because there's no directive in parliament right now there's no law we can go out and lobby against and you know demonstrate against and activists like us we need some kind of a friction to work against have a question here why do we need why do we need something to protest against why can't we propose our own ideas ourselves thank you for that question so we're going to propose something ourselves indeed the bet is that these conflicts will become severe enough that within about a year 18 months there will be a push for a new directive in parliament that's what we think just looking at the the way it evolves there are already some moves in parliament to clarify some aspects of the patent system there are some discussions about maybe software is you know a special case maybe needs its own kind of patent system which of course is in itself bogus as an argument but as a way of breaking the patent systems integrity is a very nice argument and so what we're going to do today is launch a new campaign actually we're going to do it right now thank you and benjamin will launch it is it not working come on the demo can't fail the wi-fi is working so you go on to never do a path never never do a demo on the same day it's a live demo okay guys we're also disaster anyway we're using a tool for our campaigning called wiki dot which is a really fantastic tool and i'm CEO of the company it's a new open source product we use this in all of our campaigns and it's basically lets us launch new websites in a in a few hours petitions forums the whole lot um we just made this website now i think i think he cheated actually to be honest it looks a bit too quick this is going to be called kill software patents because we want something strong and emotional and we want an enemy the enemy software patents want to kill them and basically i put a few issues here it's a i mean they're a bogus economic thing they're just they're just a fraud basically we we can see that we can prove it almost they're bad for sms europe is more than america more than china is in is a continent of little companies because of our diversity because we are you know lots and lots of countries with different languages we have lots of markets europe is particularly dependent on little companies little companies need open standards to collaborate and they're vulnerable to patents so more than america the argument that patents are bad for sms is relevant to europe and you'll see that patents open standards sms it goes together if i as a small company want to develop a product i have to work on to a standard i can't begin to develop products in in in you know just in space we make standard space products standards cannot be patented we use gpl we cannot pay royalties we cannot accept any licensing conditions and microsoft's attempts you know microsoft is facing the free market it's really quite funny on slash dot i read a discussion about the microsoft publishing its its specifications and making a promise not to sue and the typical slash dot comments someone says yeah but this is capitalism you know monopoly is part of capitalism and someone says no it's not and in fact monopoly is part of capitalism that's fine the free market will eat monopolies alive sms will actually destroy monopolies given a free market and so what microsoft does so hard is to try to destroy the free market it tries to say no there's not really competition and it's not actually working in the long run the success of free software open source proves that microsoft cannot hold that monopoly and its last its last retreat is software patents it's its final last retreat everything else that it does making really complex specifications keeping them secret trying to capture the desktop trying to leverage monopoly all that can be broken by an aggressive free market but patents can't be broken so microsoft's last ditch stand is to patent its standards publish them and then to say if you want to use these standards you've got to play to our rules and those rules exclude free software they exclude gpl they exclude commercial competition so they want to create a slave economy based on their standards and say yeah but they're open they're published and there's no coincidence that microsoft is one of the strongest lobbyists in europe for software patents because they see europe as their testing ground europe is aggressively against microsoft monopoly and america has been captured a long time ago there's no resistance there and europe is fighting back so microsoft is lobbying so hard for software patents here this is why we do this so did you make this right now it's fantastic just pretend he made it okay there's no login this is my laptop benjamin's gonna talk for five minutes here benjamin okay i wanted to add a word on on on the situation regarding the central the creation of central court basically the the big issue we have in europe is that we created what is called the european union in the 70s and at the same moment the patent people wanted to create a european patent and we have two systems basically right now which are competing against each other and the the question right now for decision makers is whether whether you will scrap the old system or you will make a compromise and the old system is called the european patent organization so you have on one side the european union system with the commission the parliament and the council of ministers and on the other side you have the european patent organization with the controlling body which is called the european patent organization and the executive which is called the european patent office and the big question right now in the discussion on committee patents is whether the european union will exceed to this international treaty called the european patent convention which regulates this european patent organization so let's say let's say you want to you want to make you want to to know who is deciding in the system in in the case of in the case of the european union is quite simple it's it's two bodies it's the council of ministers and the european parliament so when you want to change a law in europe you have to address you have to convince those two bodies and and then you can have a law or if they decide so in in the discussion right now in the in your in europe in the in especially in the council of ministers you have a proposal which proposed to get the 27 member states european union to sign this international treaty for delivering patents in europe um one of the issue is this proposal to sign this treaty is the governance so as i explained when you have want to change the law in europe you address you convince those two bodies the european parliament and the council of ministers to to make the law now if they you sign the european patent convention where you have six more members than the 27 member states as member as a signatory of the treaty then to know who is deciding is a little bit tricky um so you have these six countries which are outside of of the u turkish island norway cretia and other countries which are part of the european patent convention and what you will have is the commission sitting sitting at the administrative body who administrate the european patent service so um the key issue is whether the european parliament which represents citizens will have a say in the system in the future um basically if you go to the the page of the european uh the administrative council of the european panel office you will see that the people who are governing the system for patents europe are uh national patent offices so basically you have a conflict between let's say the executive the the institution that deliver patents and the legislative the people who decide about the law and so basically the people who grant patents uh on the national level decide also about the law and that's that was one of the key issues in the software patent directive is that in the council of ministers um the people who are deciding for the position of the ministers were the national patent offices so if the you manage one uh soon to get to be part of this international convention the whole of your european parliament won't be uh as powerful as it could be if the system would be integrated in the european union so um and and the european parliament was the only body in the whole system against the commission and the council who who was uh accountable to the people in order to reject the bad law and uh if in the future you have to change the system it is important that it's not in the hands of technocrats it should be in the hands of people you can fire with elections people who are sitting in the in the administrative council of the epo and in the in the working group on patents in the council are not elected they don't have any names and they are anonymous diplomats so that's that's something you have to take take in mind even if we have a central court in europe which will probably happen even if this court decides uh this this convention about the exclusion of computer programs we interpreted the same way the epo interprets it it's important that the the governance of the whole system is made in the hands of people who are elected and and and not in the hands of them of technocrats and i think i think that's that's one of the key message we have to put in the minds of of politicians of decision makers in in in a close future so i wrote the text this morning okay i cheated but decide i made just now so you can see it kill software patents.com if you're on your wi-fi you can look at it and the model that we will do this is the model that we did for no xml campaign there's a petition which will make with a number of oh my god the font got large again this is someone's playing with the mac there'll be a petition which we will collect supporters basically uh we did this in 2002 i guess the euro linux petition we had half million supporters that's a bit old now so a new petition in EU will do one in america as well possibly one in brazil and china india i don't know we'll start some meeting lists public meeting lists anyone can join discuss what's going on wow this one's going to get so large here basically what i'm asking for are people to join this this campaign now so if you're interested in working with us then please join the meeting list now there's one meeting list setup already and together we'll discuss and write the petition text we'll look for support from activist groups around europe there are many many groups not just ffi i but also april often you want to speak or are you going to join the petition okay i'll just i'll just conclude and then i'll have time for questions okay and the goal of this campaign is to raise one more time awareness of the issue to politicians to show that there is a popular demand for a change that we're not happy with the way things are and that we're actually we actually want a clear change a change is a ban of patents on software globally and probably as a as a conclusion would be in europe a new directive on patents as benjamin said it's in the parliament that things actually happen not in the commission not in the diplomatic conferences so thank you very much i'll now take questions i think we have like a quarter of an hour for questions thank you thanks so thank you i wanted to join this initiative but i wanted to bring a very new information from germany i started the campaign it's called 10 um 10 million euros because the government of not reinvest failure will has uh has announced to give uh 10 10 million euros to microsoft for license fees for the computers of the governmental staff right so the problem i see and this is a this is a point we need support from you also to get this public because there are only three or four five people who started this we started it from the german scholar linux team this team who is working for free software for schools and um our problem is um we see we see a connection between this uh decision from the government and the climate change and and this is because they get license for vista but the computers they have will not run with vista so they had to buy new hardware or they had to buy more license fee to get to doubt to be able to downgrade and um we see with the new vista we see a big ecological problem because the new hardware will consume more electric power and that's that's the reason why we start this campaign and i hope to get help from you okay it's that the mailing list is 10 um 7 i don't know in english at scholar linux dot de okay so but i will join it and we'll write it in english okay we are also for example in contact you'll have seen in holland that there is uh thank you there is a strong movement in in in many parts of europe to push governments to adopt uh free software open source as part of their procurement and this is a simple matter of tax dollars um it's this easier argument that climate change i would say is that it's it's a waste of money to pay for licenses when you get things for free it's a very simple argument there are other arguments such as allowing um SMEs to compete fairly for government uh contracts so what's um what we can do is try to bring together um different groups in europe who have the same problem we have very active community in spain which is convincing the spanish government region by region to adopt linux adopt open standards we have that's happening in holland and it's easier when you can share your experience across europe it makes it much much easier the arguments you can reuse so our um standard answer is to look for people who have the same problem build a kind of a common platform we can help you make that we can give you help in making websites mailing lists whatever you like and find the people and bring together so you um find benjamin after the after the speech and give him your email address and we'll talk okay any other questions over here yes i have a question about the interaction between patterns and standards currently a lot of standards organizations allow some patterns in their standards under ran terms reasonable and non discriminatory um can't be convinced uh standards organizations to change the definition of uh rand because if your main competitor is free software then a license fee is hardly non discriminatory right so what happened with standards bodies like for example itf w3c was that they began with a fairly naive assumption that patterns didn't exist and that all standards were open and as major vendors large companies got involved in the process they began to push in the concept that they somehow owned parts of the standard and they would license them and you've seen a kind of this is my view anyway a kind of a corruption of the major standards bodies by the the this dogma from from large companies and you know in the point where for example the w3c will actually endorse a standard which includes patents and it's completely hostile to free software it's completely contradictory to the the ability to to relicense your work and give it for any use and i'll just finish and the answer to this our answer to this is to say um it's actually twofold first of all is to explain why it's bad and talk about vendor capture and say the standard if it's captured captive it's useless and we won't use it we won't endorse it we will we will actually reject it and the second answer is to build an alternative model for standards development which if you if you look at the w3c iso they are fairly um captive they're in many ways they're dead i would say itf in many ways it's dead it's hostile thing to say but it's almost true so one of the things we're looking at is to actually build a new standards framework over time to develop standards and they will be very clearly open and this is why and so on okay thank you given the um amount of software patents for example in the united states do you think it's possible to create a standard that is not patented that's a very good question my company's involved in the standard development amqp we spent about three years on this now and a lot of money and time and it's true that there's a big risk that someone somewhere has a patent on this standard and we can't tell in fact the answer is most likely any activity which has any commercial value in software will provoke a patent to emerge anything so any activity which has money involved somebody will have a patent which can apply to that that's kind of the the rule at some point it will the patent will emerge um there are businesses that actively look at and are proud of it they look at areas where there is activity and they look for things to patent it's a business model and the problem isn't the patent role the problem is the law which makes us a good business model to follow and last time uh there was a campaign against software patents there was also an alliance was small and medium businesses i believed it was called a linux alliance this is still exist and um is it cooperating with the ff where i can software patents so there are many alliances of small medium businesses there are many regional alliances there are many um european organizations that represent sms what there has not been was a formal representation for sms in the it sector at the european level and actually the fi i started such an association last year called esoma the european software market association and the goal of this association was to bring in not just free software but all businesses which depend on a free market in in software which is producing or consuming and to bring them in as um active participants in the debate because it must come in a large part from business when you talk to politicians you can't just talk about you know personal ideals it comes it must have an economic basis and the answer is there are many associations i think we've made one more uh i don't think there's a conflict there i think that we we will see lots of this organization happening um it is very important yes um yeah so um recently on the belgium television they had a show um for um um uh well actually for inventors so we're inviting vendors uh and from the uh from the general public and they are supposed to send in inventions and they make a whole show of it don't you fear that um with this kind of show the general public will take patterns for granted and yes probably also apply this to software yes yes and this is this is part of the patent marketing propaganda it's a very old very old marketing problem it's more than 150 years old is to say we promote invention inventors are honest hardworking individuals look an inventor this man he invented something it's fantastic give the man a prize give the man a award and yes um and of course we're all inventors yeah this is our job we invent day and night we're creating people all of us but we don't bother going getting a patent for it and if you look at the it's a very strong argument to say we promote inventors it's a very strong counter argument to say inventors are actually patent agents look at who actually owns patents they're not the not the inventors there are some and they're exceptional and that exception proves the general rule patents are inventors are patenters inventions are patents and you can say this when you if you go to an invention day with the patent office sponsoring universities to whatever try and get a speaking slot try and get up there and speak and say look all I see you know is the sale of patents all right when you say inventor I see a patent agent when you say invention I see a patent and it'll make them sadly uncomfortable and and that's how we stop this kind of argument but the public is not very sophisticated huh this is on yeah I guess it is this may be a stupid question but obviously many things are broken about the patent system and this is all about how it affects us software people could could the patent system as a whole be made better if it only applied to say investments so if you don't invest in something you cannot be violating a patent if you look at this website that I made today called kill software patents it's not the one that's being shown here Benjamin is just reading his email you look at kill software patents and you'll find it near the bottom there's a link to an article I wrote called in defense of software patents it's a it's a not the real defense it's a full of false defense and you'll find all of the arguments for patents in general for software patents and I break them all one by one there are most of them old arguments and in fact the argument that you should reward investment is a very classic argument it's bogus it's completely bogus everybody here who writes software invests none of us expect to be rewarded by getting monopolies we get rewarded by making better products that get us customers and that pay us and if you allow the the patent system to reward investment then you come into a game and this is the answer to your question is the answer is no you can't improve it you come into a game where companies will prove investment to get patents and suddenly if you're a big company oh here you spent a hundred million that gives you a hundred million worth of patents oh okay sorry you're talking about fixing the patent system right yes sorry the question was not uh could we improve the patent system by making patents apply to investments as opposed to inventions right my question was could the patent system by be fixed by deciding that if you're not making a significant investment in something then the use you make of technology there cannot possibly be a violation of a patent in other words that you will be immune from patent litigation because you're not investing and the answer is that you can show investment trivially anyone any company can bring up paper and say i invested um though here here you would want to prove that you're not investing because that would make you immune from the patent litigation a company not investing in that may not be sued i don't understand the question i'm sorry okay if the patent system that may be stupid but if the patent system works such that if you are not investing in use of some technology then your use of that technology cannot possibly be a patent violation that is not relevant to the patent system as a whole then whoever does not invest in using technology would be free to do so when you say invest what do you mean if i write a program that uses something am i investing or not i don't think so not if i pay someone to write a program my investing or not that's up to that would be up to a judge of course and they routinely deal with that sort of issue clearly if i don't make if i don't make a free v over ip implementation i can't be sued for vip litigation i mean if i'm not using a patent in my business i won't be sued so the patent is an instrument for giving a business exclusive privilege in the market that's all it is really it's a grant from the government to a person saying you own that market it's yours yeah do what you like 20 years and the market there's people in that market so people who are not in the market won't be sued let's answer your question if you're not in the market you won't be sued okay i hear you attacking the concept of patent in general rather than the concept of software patent specifically if we are to if our goal is really to kill software patents don't you have a bigger chance in explaining why software is different why the fact that we built upon previous layers far more than any other area where where research is done it makes us more vulnerable to the patent system down other areas sure i mean this is this is like saying guns are bad and guns with children are particularly bad okay the software patents is what we are concerned about it's our business is what we see and ffi i has always been quite careful about not attacking the whole patent system and i remember when we i've been accused of being anti-patent as if being anti-patent was a crime and what i think today in fact is that when we don't question the rest of the patent system we're actually reinforcing it that's what i think today so by saying oh software is special software is different software needs its own system and for the rest the pharmaceuticals for business methods go and you know do what you like it actually i think makes our case weaker and i'm convinced that the software is an extreme case of the patent system gone crazy yes that's where it goes really bad software is a really important part of the economy but so is pharmaceutics so is health so is you know green energy so is a lot of domains which are really heavily hit by the patent system why are there no drugs for malaria the reason is that it's all patented if you research malaria you are being sued for patent infringement somebody if you research malaria you're in patent infringement so although i'm a programmer i'm also human being and i also care about the whole world if you like why i'm not limited to one thing and i also see that a lot of the arguments that help us fight the software patent problem are general arguments against the patent system so i have no problem with that the patent system for me is a completely bogus construction which can be tolerated in many industries because many industries like if you look at steel or car making there are no small companies anymore all right there only are big companies and they have all their deals worked out it's you know it's it's gone past 20 years all the patent trolls have come and gone but the software we all see it still however the patent system has this malign influence on european politics for example on american politics too we have this epo sitting outside the EU and still coming to Brussels to lobby to pass its laws so the patent system as a whole i'm happy attacking it yes i'm happy attacking it i'm happy saying the whole thing is unethical the whole thing is uneconomical the whole thing is a bogus ideology based on old old protectionist economy theory which doesn't work and in software it's particularly bad for these and these reasons okay well we've reached the end of this session now um thank you all for listening in silence unlike the questions in the previous session um and uh we resume at two o'clock into here and in about 15 other rooms