[Ecommerce] A great victory in European Parliament against software patentability

Wed Sep 24 13:08:01 2003

The detailed votes (with nominal votes) are - in MSWord format ... - at:
http://www.europarl.eu.int/direct/documents/fr/vote/Resultats/Mercredi/Appels
nominaux 2003-09-24.doc

Contrarily to what you may hear or read from Reuters, this is truly a
victory against extension of patentability. Amendements have been voted
that completely overturn the original meaning of the directive to make
it a text that excludes from patentability anything beyond the use of
forces of nature to control physical effects and exclude explicitly any
form of information processing, handling or presentation. In addition an
amendment explicitly stating than software claims can not be accepted
has been voted. For specialists 69-70-71-72 and first part of 55 + 57 +
interoperability exception have gone through.

I guess that the Green and GUE have voted against the global report
because they are afraid that this might be manipulated in the further
political and implementation proces (in particular they wanted another
version of the definition of technical - amendment 55 second half
instead of 69 to go through, but it was not even submitted to vote,
based on erroneous statement that 69 would be equivalent). Another very
important amendment of the Green (57) has nonetheless made it (it
forbids to use non-technical characteristics to judge if there is a
technical contribution, practice that had allowed the patent office to
decree that anything was technically innovative).

This is nonetheless a historical turning point: for the first time, a
cross-party coalition has said no to the permanent extension of patents
and other forms of restrictions to free and open knowledge. Already in
1995 the Parliament rejected a first version of the biotech patents
directive, but this was a different coalition, much less clear, and
shortlived. To measure the importance, see the detailed vote on
amendment 55 first half voted 300 to 223 with the PSE divided 2/3-1/3
and the PPE divided 1/3-2/3

The news releases announce the vote as a victory for patentability (see
Reuters). Let's hope that the truth will reach even the news.

Now let's get ready for the fights in the European Council. The voted
amendments are clearly unacceptable for those countries where the patent
lobbies have key influence, as well as for the Commission, so they will
do anything to get rid of them.

Philippe Aigrain
www.sopinspace.com/~aigrain/en/

See also this FFII press release:

FFII News -- For Immediate Release -- Please Redistribute
See http://swpat.ffii.org/#news [ffii.org]

Now we will have to see whether the European Commission is committed to
"harmonisation and clarification" or only to patent owner interests.

Yesterday's threats uttered by Bolkestein against the European
Parliament suggest the latter.

The detailed results are available on our site

http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/plen0923/ [ffii.org]

It will now be our job to help the European Parliament assert itself
against attempts by Bolkestein and patent lawyers wearing the hat of
national governments to crush the directive project.

The current text has some remaining contraditions in it, but basically
the thrust has been turned around. It has become our directive which we
must help the European Parliament to defend. This is also a question of
the European Parliament's role in an emerging democratic Europe. On the
whole this is very good news for the EU.

--
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance tel. +49-89-18979927
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation http://swpat.ffii.org/
270,000 votes 2000 firms against software patents http://noepatents.org/

See also the Press relese