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 <title>Opposing The European Software Patent Directive
 - GNU Project - Free Software Foundation</title>
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 <h2>Opposing The European Software Patent Directive</h2>
 
 <address class="byline">by <a href="https://www.stallman.org/">Richard
 Stallman</a> and Nick Hill</address>
 
 <div class="infobox">
 <p><em>
 The European Union software patent directive, which this 2003 article
 opposed, was ultimately dropped by its own supporters after facing
 lots of opposition.  However, they later found another way to impose
 software patents on most of Europe: through fine print in
 the <a href="/philosophy/europes-unitary-patent.html">unitary
 patent</a>.</em></p>
 </div>
 <hr class="thin" />
 
 <p>
 The computer industry is threatened by a Wild West-style land grab. The
 biggest, richest companies are being assisted by governments to take
 unassailable exclusive control of the ideas that programmers combine to
 make a program.</p>
 
 <p>
 Our society is becoming more dependent on information technology. At
 the same time, centralised control over and ownership of the
 information technology field is increasing, and mega-corporations with
 law-given dominion over our computers could take away our freedoms and
 democracy.  With an effective monopoly on modern software, the largest
 grabbers of the &ldquo;land&rdquo; will have control over what we can
 ask our computers to do, and control over production and distribution
 of information on the net, through monopolies that the EU plans to
 give them.</p>
 
 <p>
 The monopolies are patents, each one restricting use of one or several
 of these software ideas. We call them &ldquo;software patents&rdquo;
 because they restrict what we programmers can make software do. How do
 these monopolies work?  If you wish to use your computer as a word
 processor, it must follow instructions that tell it how to act like a
 word processor. This is analogous to instructions found on a musical
 score, which tell an orchestra how to play a symphony. The
 instructions are not simple. They are made up of thousands of smaller
 instructions, much like sequences of notes and chords. A symphonic
 score embodies hundreds of musical ideas, and a computer program uses
 hundreds or thousands of software ideas. Since each idea is abstract,
 there are often different ways to describe it: thus, some ideas can be
 patented in multiple ways.</p>
 
 <p>
 The US, which has had software patents since the 1980s, shows what this can
 do to development of everyday software. For example, in the US there are 39
 monopoly claims over a standard way of showing video using software
 techniques (the <abbr title="Moving Picture Experts Group">MPEG</abbr>&nbsp;2
 format).</p>
 
 <p>
 Since a single piece of software can embody thousands of ideas together,
 and those ideas are arbitrary in scope and abstract in nature, writing
 software will only be worthwhile for those who are rich and have a large
 software monopoly portfolio: those with the war chest and clout to fight
 off claims that might otherwise sink a business. In the US, the average
 cost of defending against an invalid patent claim is $1.5 million. The
 courts favour the wealthy, so even when a small business gets a few
 patents, it will find them useless.</p>
 
 <p>
 Software patents are being claimed at a tremendous rate in the US. If they
 become legal in Europe, most of those US patents will be extended to
 Europe also. This is likely to have a devastating effect on European
 software development&mdash;leading to job losses, a poorer economy, more
 expensive computer use, and less choice and less freedom for the end user.
 The advocates of software patents in Europe, and the probable beneficiaries
 of them, are the patent bureaucracy (more influence on more areas of life),
 patent lawyers (more business from both plaintiffs and defendants), and
 computer mega-corporations such as IBM and Microsoft.</p>
 
 <p>
 Foremost among the software mega-corporations is Microsoft. Even as
 part of the European commission investigates Microsoft for
 monopolistic practices, another part is planning to hand it an
 unending series of overlapping 20-year monopolies. Bill Gates wrote in
 his Challenges and Strategy memo of May 16 1991 that</p>
 
 <blockquote>
 <p>
 If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of
 today's ideas were invented and had taken out patents, the industry
 would be at a complete standstill today. The solution &hellip; is
 patenting as much as we can &hellip; A future start-up with no patents
 of its own will be forced to pay whatever price the giants choose to
 impose.</p>
 </blockquote>
 
 <p>
 Today Microsoft hopes to parlay software patents into a permanent
 monopoly on many areas of software.</p>
 
 <p>
 The European commission says its proposed directive on
 computer-implemented inventions will disallow software patents. But
 the text was actually written by the Business Software Alliance, which
 represents the largest software companies. (The commission didn't
 admit this&mdash;we detected it.) It contains vague words that we
 suspect are designed to open the door for software patents.</p>
 
 <p>
 The text says that computer-related patents must make a
 &ldquo;technical contribution&rdquo;; the commission says that means
 &ldquo;no software patents.&rdquo;  But &ldquo;technical&rdquo; can be
 interpreted in many ways. The European patent office is already
 registering software patents of dubious legal validity, defying the
 treaty that governs it and the governments that established it.
 Operating under those words, it will stretch them to allow all kinds
 of software patents.</p>
 
 <p>
 Arlene McCarthy, <abbr title="Member of the European Parliament">MEP</abbr>
 for north-west England, has been a key figure promoting and acting as
 rapporteur for this proposed directive. The cosmetic changes she has
 so far proposed do nothing to solve the problem.  However, the
 cultural affairs commission's amendment that defines
 &ldquo;technical&rdquo; will assure British and European software
 developers that they will not risk a lawsuit simply by writing and
 distributing a software package.</p>
 
 <p>
 The vague words drafted by the mega-corporations must be replaced with
 clear, decisive wording. Wording that will ensure that our information
 future will not be hijacked by the interests of a few rich organisations.</p>
 
 <p>
 Please go
 to <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20031216123801/http://www.softwarepatents.co.uk">
 softwarepatents.co.uk [Archived Page]</a> to learn more, and then talk with the MEPs from
 your region.</p>
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 <p>Copyright &copy; 2003, 2013, 2021 Richard M. Stallman and Nicholas R. Hill</p>
 
 <p>This page is licensed under a <a rel="license"
 href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/4.0/">Creative
 Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License</a>.</p>
 
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 <p class="unprintable">Updated:
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 $Date: 2021/09/16 16:56:20 $
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