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The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure has a call for donations against the Unitary Software Patent Trolls after Thursday's disastrous Bundestag vote. On Thursday in Germany, the Bundestag voted on ratification of a proposal for a Unified Patent Court, largely seen as purely a vehicle for introducing software patents into Europe. As software patents in the US were on the way out, introducing them into Europe would bring them back into the US after further "harmonization". Thursday's vote is the result of the software patent lobby changing its strategy in Europe by creating a central patent court outside of the control of the individual member states under which it would make its own rules and avoid democratically elected legislators.
FFII is now calling on its supporting companies and on the open source community to donate to crowdfund a Constitutional Complaint in Karlsruhe. Stopping the UPC in Germany will be enough to kill the UPC for the whole Europe. Politicians willfully ignored the problem that the UPC violates the “Rule of Law” principle, as the EPO still cannot be sued for maladministration, where there are 4 pending complaints in Karlsruhe, which should be issued in early 2021.
Next steps are a vote in the Bundesrat, according to Stjerna’s blogpost
Legal Committee of the Federal Council is currently scheduled for 02/12/2020
Federal Council can therefore be expected to make its final deliberation on the draft legislation in its 998th session on 18/12/2020
–Dr Stjerna blog, Status of the UPCA ratification proceedings in Germany (12/12/2016, latest update on 26/11/2020) https://www.stjerna.de/restart/?lang=en
German government believe that they can ratify before the end of the year, as they consider the UK still a member of the EU till 31st December. The agenda of next votes have been designed on purpose to ratify the UPC before the end of the year.
This plot twist is time-dependent and hangs upon a loophole in Brexit. Thus the time between now and New Year are crucial for preserving the ability to use or develop software in Europe. Again, this is about the uses to which software may be applied, not distribution. Usage is covered by patent law, distribution by copyright law.
The FFII is a pan-European alliance of software companies and independent software developers. It is currently working to neutralize the Unitary Patent project, which is a third attempt to introduce software patents into Europe. The previous two attempts failed, but only because of the joint efforts of thousands of companies to defend against software patents in Europe.
Previously:
(2020) UK Formally Abandons Europe's Unified Patent Court
(2020) Deadly Blow to the Pox of Software Patents in the EU
(2018) Software Patents are Harmful
(2018) A Case for the Total Abolition of Software Patents
(Score: 5, Interesting) by Rich on Saturday November 28 2020, @02:39PM (3 children)
I'm not sure their efforts will help. As all the past actions have shown, they might slow down the inevitable, but that might be well calculated in by those driving the changes.
What might help, maybe, is if they "discover" a Chinese-Communist-Party memo detailing an economic war plan to use software patents to drive the German auto industry and their suppliers to their knees and take them over under value, bleed their assets, and shut them down to only keep the badges for China-made vehicles. Best with detailed company names, applicable patent counts for "applied for", "granted", "acquired", "to be aquired", just short of actual numbers, damage figures in million dollars, earliest possible takeover dates, and latest shutdown dates.
If that discovery is credible, the spook will be gone in a week.
(Score: 2) by Rich on Saturday November 28 2020, @04:24PM (2 children)
It occured to me that with the number of lawyers in the involved circles, the paper would not avert but accelerate the process, after all there's money to be made in court. It would be mandatory that the paper also outlines a strategy that to reduce offensive cost, such cases have to be brought by lawyers that have been recruited from the bottom of the profession and are willing to lend their names for $20/hr while all the actual paperwork is done by students and graduates of the CCP International Law University, Beijing. (But that still doesn't reduce the money to be made on the defense side... sigh.)
(Score: 2, Touché) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 28 2020, @05:00PM (1 child)
So, a Steele Dossier, rewritten?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 29 2020, @06:11AM
For others like me, who didn't know what it is: [wikipedia.org]