Congrats Europeans!

Congrats Europeans!

Posted Aug 29, 2003 23:19 UTC (Fri) by Carl (guest, #824)
In reply to: Congrats Europeans! by pointwood
Parent article: EU software patent vote delayed

The problem is that we already have lots of software patents here :(

But that is precisely the point! The European Patent Office (EPO) has illegally granted these patents against the letter and spirit of the current law. National judges in several European countries have criticised the EPO's practise and refused to recognize these patents as valid. Now this commission wants to "harmonize" the national laws to force the different countries to adopt laws which (retroactively) make these patents legal.

By casting this as a simple law harmonization issue the Legal Affairs Committe is trying to make this a small issue and saving the EPO some embarrassment when the big companies (Microsoft and IBM are the biggest holders of these illegal patents) find out that they have worthless papers.

But it is a really big change since currently "discoveries, scientific theories, mathematical methods, aesthetic creations, schemes, rules and methods for performing mental acts, playing games or doing business, programs for computers, and presentations of information" are all clearly not patentable according to Art 52 of the European Patent Convention. The committee tries to just remove these clear exceptions and introduce some (ill formulated) new exception rules which are more in line with what the EPO has been doing but which judges just don't accept! (http://swpat.ffii.org/analysis/epc52/index.en.html)

BTW I thought the "Test Suite" that the ffii/eurolinux people came up with was pretty good: http://swpat.ffii.org/analysis/testsuite/index.en.html and http://www.ffii.org/proj/kunst/swpat/pamflet/europarl03-testbed.en.pdf It presents some of these patents that the EPO has illegally granted in the past and asks some simple questions be answered:

• Is this an algorithm?
• Is this a business method?
• Is there a "technical contribution"?
• Should this innovation be patentable subject matter?
• Does your favorite proposal clearly say so?

And very important:

• Would any judge reach the same conclusions?
• Where are areas of incertainty?

Hopefully now that the proposal seem to be redrafted someone will take the time to answer those questions so a real decission on whether this "clearification" of the European Patent Convention is a good idea or not.

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