News on European Patents [LWN.net]

Michel Rocard (former Prime Minister of France and now on the Committee on Culture, Youth, Education, the Media and Sport) is proposing an amendment (PDF format) to explicitly rule out patent-ability on information processing. The amendment is well written and we can only hope that it will have some influence on the European parliament. Thanks to Laurent Guerby

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Posted Jan 28, 2003 17:21 UTC (Tue) by jdthood (subscriber, #4157) [Link]

Actually the file is a list of amendments to European
patent law proposed by several different parties.
The amendment proposals fall into two groups which we
might label "left" and "right". On the left are
proposals that would exclude computer processes from
patentability --- restricting patents to inventions of
physical devices and processes, emphasize the need for
novelty for an invention to be patentable, and
strengthen publishing requirements. This group includes
amendments put forward by Rocard, Geneviève Fraisse,
and Raina A. Mercedes Echerer. On the right are
amendments proposed by Janelly Fourtou which would
strengthen patent rights and explicitly *include*
computer processes among patentable entities.

Fourtou gives some very clear justification for his
amendments. There is TRIPS. There is the fact that
the European Patent Office is already granting software
patents, and the mandate of the Commission is not
to change existing practice but to codify it. Fourtou
argues that European law already allows software to
be patented, and that it would be a bad idea to try
to draw a new distinction between software (to become
unpatentable) and programmed devices (patentable),
since that would mean that there could be software that
was legal to sell but illegal to sell packaged with
hardware to run it on.

I have more thinking to do about all of this. Thanks
for the link.