Patent Nonsense: Euro elections and Geekfest collide

dublin | eu | news report Tuesday May 25, 2004 11:59 by seedot

1 guru, 250 programmers and 3 MEP candidates. The campaign against EU patents - or how the world is really run.

You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wear a yellow t-shirt.

When Indymedia has pictures of Guards in riot gear, protestors in costumes or attacks on some local politician thousands click on the link and often there are hundreds of comments. When technical issues get covered the silence is often deafening. When the guru of the free software movement, Richard Stallman, gives a talk in a lecture theatre in Trinity college its not the type of event you would expect to incite passions. Where’s the politics?

This talk though, was important enough that three MEP candidates turned up in the middle of the campaign, including one sitting MEP. Organised by the Irish Free Software Organisation as part of their campaign against software patents the talk laid bare much of what troubles people about the EU and the role of ‘Mega Corporations (tm Richard Stallman) in setting public policy. The audience was what you would expect – mostly male, mostly computer literate, mostly involved in the software industry. But the material was accessible, interesting, even funny. And very frightening.

Stallman has been giving this talk for a while now, most recently in London on Friday, and it shows. He acted out the conversation between IBM with their 9,000 patents and a new company with a single patent in the form of a dialog, playing the part of big scary IBM on his tiptoes. Some of the jokes were for the audience – a routine about the difference between physical engineering and software engineering, based around inserting an ‘If’statement in a ‘While’ loop doesn’t seem to offer much laugh potential – but I guess you had to have been there. Overall, he stayed on issue and I don’t think anyone would have been swamped by technology – so why do issues like this not get more attention?

Definitely not coming from an ‘anti-capitalist’ framework, Stallman laid out the case that software patents discourage innovation, harm developers and serve the purpose only of mega corporations and patent parasites. He gave examples such as the gif and jpg standards (for graphics on the web), and the way spreadsheets sort data all being covered by patents. He talked of how much work would be involved if someone tried to abide by the laws, checking every patent – and even then it is likely they would not be able to buy a license. He talked of the political process – where the European Parliament opposed patent legislation only to see the issue come back up in the Council of Ministers. He spoke of the Australian government, a European small businesses group of 2 million members and most of the informed software community (both users and developers) opposing this legislation.

During the questions at the end we saw some of the infamous bad humour as he laid out how questions were to be asked, gave out that he couldn’t hear or understand people and then interrupted every question to aggressively make his point. It’s obvious why Richard Stallman is not a politician. Of the politicians (or aspiring politicos) who were there, Eoin Dubsky and Patrician Mackenna had a bit of a love in saying they would vote for each other if they were in the right constituency (probably a surprise to the green candidate in Leinster). MacKenna was the more interesting of the two talking about the process of amending the legislation and the ongoing battle against the lobbyists in Europe. Ivana Bacik popped up at the end to add her support – in an unfortunately blatant piece of electioneering since she hadn’t heard the talk.

The IFSO recorded the whole thing and, as you would expect, the web is overflowing with information about this. Have a read and ask the candidates – this is something that does happen in Europe, that an MEP can affect and that most of them know nothing about. But then, they’re no different to most of us.