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.