From: sf@fermigier.com To: lwn@lwn.net Subject: Eurolinux Proposals for EC Consultation on Software Patents Date: Tue, 13 Mar 2001 08:50:45 +0100 (CET) Eurolinux Proposals for EC Consultation on Software Patents The Eurolinux Alliance has sent a letter to the European Commission, asking them to resume consultations on software patentability which seem to have been interrupted. Munich, Brussels, Amsterdam and Leipzig The Eurolinux Alliance has sent a letter to the European Commission, asking them to resume consultations on software patentability which seem to have been interrupted. The European Commission had called for submission of statements on the question of how software should be treated by the patent system. Between Oct 15 and Dec 15 more than 1000 programmers had sent statements describing the negative impact of software patents on their work and calling on the European Commission to put an end to the practise of the European Patent Office (EPO), which has, in violation of the letter and spirit of European patent law, granted approximately 30000 patents on problems of program logic. At the European Commission, the Directorate for the Internal Market (DGIM) is in charge of patent affairs and of the consultation. The patent law experts in charge at DGIM have during the past few years fully supported the position of the European Patent Office. The consultation paper published by the DGIM accurately restates this position. On Dec 21, the DGIM has hosted a conference of selected patent experts from the national governments and the European Patent Office, who unanimously encouraged the DGIM to go ahead and prepare a directive soon, so as to impose the practise of the EPO on national patent courts, many of which have been very reluctant to grant software patents. The Eurolinux Alliance of software companies and non-profit associations holds the "European Patent Corporation" responsible of having "illegally littered the information highway" with a "big pile of poisonous waste", a "Horror Gallery of European Software Patents". Frank Hoen, CEO of Netpresenter, the Dutch inventors web push technologies, explains: Patenting software ideas is like prohibiting the use of certain structure elements in the plot of a novel. It is ridiculous, because the difficulty does not lie in thinking up the individual elements but in putting together a well-formed complex work. If the EPO has its way, every one of our software projects will have to be followed by a few hundred expensive patent applications. And even then, we are at the mercy of predators who don't write software but just engage in the lucrative business of milking the software industry. Xuan Baldauf, CEO of Medianet GmbH in Leipzig and speaker of the Federation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) adds: The patent lawyers at the Euoropean Commission are about to deprive us of our copyright to our own programs. At least they are making copyright worthless. And they are abolishing our freedom of expression. Just because programmers are a minority and most people are not fully aware of the nature of programming, these patent lawyers seem to believe that they can get away with stripping us of basic civil rights. They are acting against the Europe's legal tradition, which prohibits the patenting of programming solutions and, in general, any solution which can be validated by pure logic, without testing the effect of natural forces. The patent lawyers at the European Commission know this. They use traditional legal terms such as "technical character" and "technical contribution". But these terms no longer mean anything. They have been reduced to the status of political codewords. This reminds me of our politbureau of former days. Honnecker's friends spoke a lot about "people's democracy", "socialist realism" etc. Ten years after the peaceful revolution, I am surprised to meet again the same ambivalent Orwellian Newspeak, the same docile faith in party dogma, the same defiance of law and economics, the same reluctance to consult the public. Meanwhile, the EC consultation has apparently stalled, and only a tiny fraction of the submitted consultation papers have been published on the DGIM website. Figures about the Petition for a Software Patent Free Europe Number of Signatures: > 70000 Number of corporate sponsors: > 200 Number of signatures by country: Germany (16663), France (11824), Spain (3959), Italy (3586), Denmark (3236), Sweden (2370), Netherlands (2119), Austria (1836), Belgium (1810), Switzerland (1440), Finland (1360), Czechia (974) Number of individual signatures by company: Siemens (112), IBM (109), Ericsson (97), Cap Gemini (82), SuSE (81), Nokia (71), France Telecom / Wanadoo (71), Alcatel (66), Hewlett Packard (52), Atos (48), MandrakeSoft (47), SNCF (French Railways) (30), ID PRO (30), Deutsche Telekom (29), SAP (29), Sun Microsystems (26), Oracle (21), EDF (21), innominate AG (21), Lucent Technologies (21), CERN (20), debis (20), Alcôve (18), Belgacom / Skynet (17), Nortel (17), Cisco (14) References * Replies to the EC swpat consultation - http://europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/en/intprop/indprop/softreplies.htm * The Eurolinux Software Patent Consultation Page - http://petition.eurolinux.org/consultation * Eurolinux Petition for a Software Patent Free Europe - http://petition.eurolinux.org/ * Patents - http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/pikta/index.en.html * EC Directive Proposal - http://swpat.ffii.org/stidi/eurili/indexen.html About EuroLinux - www.eurolinux.org The EuroLinux Alliance for a Free Information Infrastructure is an open coalition of commercial companies and non-profit associations united to promote and protect a vigourous European Software Culture based on Open Standards, Open Competition and Open Source Software such as Linux. Corporate members or sponsors of EuroLinux develop or sell software under free, semi-free and non-free licenses for operating systems such as GNU/Linux, MacOS or Windows. The EuroLinux Alliance has co-organised in 1999, together with the French Embassy in Japan, the first Europe-Japan conference on Linux and Free Software. The EuroLinux Alliance is at the initiative of the www.freepatents.org web site to promote and protect innovation and competition in the European IT industry. Press Contacts France and Europe: Stéfane Fermigier, sf@fermigier.com Germany and Europe: Hartmut Pilch, +49-89-18979927 Denmark and Northern Europe: denmark@eurolinux.org Belgium: belgium@eurolinux.org Permanent URL for this PR http://www.eurolinux.org/news/pr0101 Legalese Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. Windows is a registered trademark of Microsoft Inc. MacOS is a registered trademark of Apple Inc. All other trademarks and copyrights are owned by their respective companies.