From phm@a2e.de  Mon Jun 11 08:29:35 2001
From: phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)
Date: Mon, 11 Jun 2001 09:29:35 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: Sw pats and nazi propaganda ('twas: Re:  [Patents] free sw
 removed from german website ...)
In-Reply-To: <200106102049.WAA29611@bartu.bos.a2e.de>
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.33.0106110901210.23695-100000@mulix.oas.a2e.de>

> though I don't know what happened to that man which published
> it(has he been extradited ? Or not?),

He travelled to Germany and was arrested there.

> publishing of nazi propaganda is one of the cases when it is justified
> for the courts to 'exceed' their jurisdictions. The more the (neo)nazi
> fear of justice, the better it is. I hold the position that there
> shout NOT be any freedom for nazis; oh, let them gas themselves. Or
> let them shoot themselves in their heads. Yes, they are free to do it.
> But not to call to gas or shoot others, only for being Poles, Jews,
> Gypsies, Russians or so. I *HATE* nazis. And I hope you hate them,
> too.

The question here is not whether making a free speech exception for "hate
propaganda" is more justified than one for "intellectual property
infringement".

The question here is whether and to what extent German courts can decide
on matters concerning an australian website of an australian citizen.

These two questions must stay independent of each other.  Matters would
become far to complicated for anyone to decide if they can be mixed up.

> > Thus things have become very uncalculable for an ordinary citizen.
>
> Not for me, Hartmut (though I'm not a citizen of Germany). This one
> "extraordinary" case doesn't bind a court in any way.

An American court could believe that a German free-rider is depriving
American inventors of the fruit of their work and that that is not covered
by free speech and that, since the main damage is occurring within the US,
the American court is entitled to pass a verdict.

German courts would have a hard time finding fault with such reasoning.

They could of course try, but how can Dersch count on that?

> We *MUST* tell the US invaders: get out of Europe.

That's something for another campaign, not the Eurolinux petition or so.
Your agenda is far too general.

> Get out with your stupid 'laws', with your software patents, with your
> culture of death, your "political correctness", your racial problems,
> your crime promotion on TV, movies etc. (I mean the violent movies,
> and so on). We may accept some of your things, but only those which
> are beneficial and good for Europeans. And thus, we should adopt free
> market (it's greater in USA than in Europe anyway; consider the 'milk
> quotas' and other 'limits' regulations' of production in Europe; there
> are none such in USA), free speech (1st Amendment), gun rights (2nd
> Amendment), personal privacy (4th Amendment AFAIR).

Actually it is the 1st Amendment that is protecting some of the "nazi hate
propaganda" which you want to see exempted.  German courts had similar
problems with German language nazi websites based in the US.

Free Market again cannot exist without a public counter-weight.  Even more
so if you are to a large extent against regulation by "intellectual
property", the market provides no sufficient incentive to produce valuable
informational/cultural goods and other public goods, including public
order and moral.  The Free Market doesn't develop that out of itself and
it cannot be taken for granted or developped out of a simple set of rules
either.  Which is one important reasons for the many negative cultural
influences which you attribute to the US.

"Free Market" is a good program whenever you want to reform an outdated
system of regulation and make an unjustified bureaucracy more lean.
But it is not a complete political programme in itself.  It needs to
embedded in something else.  Maybe a dualism of "Free Forum" and "Free
Market", where the Forum needs to be supported by public efforts.  Simple
game theory considerations (prisoner's dilemma etc) will teach you that
in order to maintain public institutions (including supporting the "Free
Forum"), you need limitations on liberty and also taxation or something
similar.

> Surely it will be enough. If I've got such an 'order' I would try to
> make it public and, in some way, to become the personally
> famous: well, Critto is the man banned from gettin' into US. For
> what ? For defending FREEDOM of programming -- this could
> unmask the real face of today's USA: NO land of freedom or home
> of the brave. A country ruled by the federal gangs (sorry, agencies)
> and the greedy corporations, which have an anti-market,
> mercantilist mindset (not all of them, of course).

The mercantilist mindset is stronger in Europe. But the US probably has a
problem of lawyer power, and perhaps also one of an overly large and
unoverseeable central institutions which undermine people's sense of
political responsibility.  Europe may be heading for even worse scenarios,
since it is building even more unoverseeable central institutions.  The
backside of such institutions is that people no longer trust the public
sphere's capability of solving problems but instead prefer to trust a kind
of wild-west "free market".

Patents are a very natural thing in that environment:  on the one hand
they correspond to the mercantilist's belief that there must be an
institutionalised "protection" and "entitlement to success", on the other
they don't require public policy decisions but just work as a huge
collection of independent micro-decisions that integrates well with the
market system.

I therefore always found it strange that the US and not the EU is at the
spearhead of patent inflation.  As Europe is becoming politically
stronger, that may change.

I wrote down some more thoughts about the mechanisms of patent inflation
under

	http://swpat.ffii.org/stidi/tisna/

--
Hartmut Pilch                                           http://phm.ffii.org/
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation	      http://swpat.ffii.org/
79100 signatures against software patents         http://www.noepatents.org/



