A sad day to be an European

General feedback and discussion of the game.

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Coristo
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A sad day to be an European

Post by Coristo »

I just can't believe that they did, what they did... It just seems impossible to me... It all felt like we have already won, and now... guess not only the US has some stupid politics when it comes to OS :(

Now all hope in the parliament...

P.S. And to not make this to much OT: patents are very evil, and... they hurt this project :P
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Ankka
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Post by Ankka »

:?::?::?:

What are you talking about??
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Post by rogue »

I believe he is speaking of the law that was mentioned on the front page of this site.

I would appreciate if somebody would give a concise explanation of what it means.
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silene
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Post by silene »

Ankka wrote:What are you talking about??
The European Union's Council of Ministers has adopted a directive that will ease software patent.

And this post is not off-topic, since the front page of Wesnoth website mentions it.
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Post by Sangel »

How undemocratic.
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Pythagoras
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Post by Pythagoras »

I don't understand. So can somebody be dasterdly and patent wesnoth?!?!? I don't understand what exactly is going on.
Disto
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Post by Disto »

Basically to my understanding it means that the EU are stopping some devs (don't know why not entirely how what where or when but hey). Eg (sorry for the language)
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Post by Tieom »

I think it's like... if someone showed up with a patent for, say, "A system by which the vitality of a game unit is abstracted into a numerical value," then they'd be able to sue anyone who used hitpoints in their computer games into the ground based on patent infringement. At least, that's the way it seems in my (admittedly) poorly-informed view.
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Post by Sangel »

Well, you've got the idea of normal patents roughly right - and companies in the US can often get away with stuff that blatant. Amazon has a patent on "one-click shopping", for instance - the ability to click a button on an item and head straight to purchasing. Everyone else has to use "shopping carts".

Software patents, as I understand them, are even more invidious. Essentially, a company patents a certain bit of computer code. Then, if anyone else uses that piece of code anywhere in their software, they can be sued.

Basically, it's like allowing people to patent bits of mathematics.
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Post by rogue »

Now, does this mean Sid Meier's company could patent "Civilization" and then sue the people who make FreeCiv?

Is a company allowed to grab all of the open source code on Sourceforge, patent it, and then sue the open source developers for using patented code?

I'm not sure how deep the entrails of this law will reach or how often it will actually be put into practice, but it sounds like the sort of thing that could be quite a hindrance.
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turin
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Post by turin »

Software patents are evil. Repeat after me: EVIL. >(

The U.S. has had them for a while, though. EU, welcome to the club. :(
rogue wrote:Now, does this mean Sid Meier's company could patent "Civilization" and then sue the people who make FreeCiv?
No. AFAICT, a patent can only be on a type of thing, not a specific example. And a patent on RTS civilization-building games would probably fail, since so many companies have created them.
rogue wrote:Is a company allowed to grab all of the open source code on Sourceforge, patent it, and then sue the open source developers for using patented code?
I believe that would not work, but I'm not sure. It really doesn't make any sense to do that, though, and I doubt it would be allowed...
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Post by Big Bad Joe »

So just a few lagal runts:
This new directive can not work retroactively - means not back in time - means everything in use now is not patentable, or if the patent would be given, and the patent owner sued someone from it - only thing necessary is to proove that you used it this way before patenting..
Question is of course about the things you can patent - generally ideas - like one click selling are not patentable, the way how they are doing it - is..
I could look on it with my lawyer eye if necessary, but it will be not that big anyway.
Anybody heard about expiration of rights - the main idea in european intellectual property and patent law. It is a theorem that said, that all your rights from patent expires with your giving of a product to a market - so if you sell a CD with program, you are not patent protected against someone - who makes his own ( not use yours) with similar functions..
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Post by Disto »

Whats the direct effect of this patent, whatever?
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Pythagoras
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Post by Pythagoras »

Disto wrote:Whats the direct effect of this patent, whatever?
It doesn't sound like there is a direct result, only a potential future threat of money-grubbing bozos claiming they were the ones who invented some feature that Wesnoth implements sometime after this law is in effect.

I don't think anyone is going to be patenting the idea of hitpoints or the character string then forcing everyone to pay him/her $$$. Anything that has been in use will not be affected, future innovations, however, will.

At least what I surmise

It does suck for innovation, and being able to borrow ideas from great games in the future.

Idea: Can is there any scheme where the development occur purely in the US (or some other non-software patent country) on say a US development server?
OR
Create a foundation for patenting ideas generated by the free software community that allows them to be used freely under a GNU like license.
Last edited by Pythagoras on March 8th, 2005, 10:25 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Post by tephlon »

It is rather difficult to give a "concise" explanation of what is going on, but I'll bring up some points I find "interesting" (read: horrendous).
  • The only proponents of this directive are large corporations and...yes, exactly, the patent lawyers. The intended "inventors", the software developers, do not want this kind of patents.
  • Even though software patents are explicitly exempt from patentability according to the European Patent Convention (EPC), the European Patent Office (EPO) has granted about 30000 of these anyway. They do this on the basis that computer programs "as such" cannot be patented, but if they have a "technical effect", then they can. And somehow they believe that it is enough to run the computer program in a computer to make it have a technical effect...
  • The proponents say they want software patents to "protect" business(es) in Europe. How this is supposed to work, they avoid mentioning. Like how can business in Europe be protected by legalizing software patents, when 70% of the 30000 that EPO has granted are owned by companies in the US and Japan?
  • Applying for patents is expensive and hiring armies of lawyers is also expensive, so how can this help small and medium-sized enterprises? (Or free software/open source projects for that matter.)
  • Everybody says they are against "pure software patents", and take the system in the US as a bad example, so it is difficult to keep track of what people really think and work for. The usual argument from the proponents among the politicians (who obviously have been spoon-fed with what they should think from large companies, or can't read, or are lying) is that the current directive do not allow for pure software patents. Well, everybody else says it does. And it doesn't really matter, since the EPO is granting exactly this kind of pure software patents anyway, even though it shouldn't be possible.
  • One also has to think about why patents exist. They exist to promote development by working as an incentive for companies to invest a lot of money and effort in developing stuff that would otherwise not have been developed. Like the expensive medical research that pharmaceutical companies do. Well, software development doesn't really work that way. In any case, software patents are used to kill off competition, so they work in exactly the opposite way of what was intended.
  • ...and so on and so forth.
Here are some links, so you can read for yourself.
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