Through these regional interest group activities, McCarthy may have come into contact with the venture capital scene. In JURI discussions of spring 2003, she supported her pro-patent viewpoints by citing the positive experience of a couple whose garage enterprise had grown big thanks to speech recognition patents. While we do not know who this enterprise was and whether it survived the dotcom crash, it was indeed commonplace around 1998 for VC investors in the software field to ask for patents.

Around the time of the Nov 7th hearing, McCarthy tried to stress her "complete open-mindedness". On 2002/11/06 McCarthy underlined this open-mindedness by receiving Jean-Paul Smets (Eurolinux). At a hearing on the following day, she said that patentability rules should be clarified in terms of sample patents. In early december she moreover gave a speech to the JURI committee, in which she suggested that the current patent practise of the EPO produces questionable patents and might indeed need some fixing. This however ultimately did not lead to further discussions or a change of mind.

During the interval from december to february 2002, McCarthy lived in seclusion from her peers, including fellow PSE members of parliament. When her draft report came out in 2003/02/19 and JURI meetings started, she stayed away from many meetings for reasons of illness and regularly complained about lobbying against her at other meetings, apparently attempting to present herself as a victim and trying to shift the focus of the discussion onto alleged unfair treatment of her person. She intensified this approach in early May, when she complained to Hartmut Pilch from FFII/Eurolinux with cc to Daniel Cohn-Bendit MEP and later to various press organs and to JURI that she had received an invitation to a FFII/Eurolinux-organised public meeting too late and that FFII/Eurolinux was trying to exclude her from the discussion.

The critics of McCarthy's approach have repeatedly tried to ask her to explain her view in terms of a set if example patents. She has consistently refused to answer these questions. Instead she has either stayed quiet or lectured people with a standard FAQ document which again speaks only in abstract dogmatic terms. She tried to justify this approach by saying to MEPs on 2003/06/16:

We have attemted to set some limits in perhaps a moderately restrictive way, without entirely reinventing patent law, which I would hasten to add, we are not in ability to do that, we are legislators to create framework and laws for interpretation by experts, but we are not experts ourselves.

Meanwhile McCarthy and her allies Malcolm Harbour, Janelly Fourtou and Dr. Joachim Wuermeling have steadfastly opposed all amendment proposals which could have effectively limited patentability or patent enforcability in any way.

At discussions within the Legal Affairs Committee (JURI), McCarthy has claimed that software patents are good for "a family enterprise that works on speech recognition and protects itself by means of a patent". Also, she lashed out against "those lobbyists who are abusing the debate as an opportunity to attack [ those poor honest hardworking officials from ] the European Patent Office."

McCarthy is fully aware of the British consulations, of the meaningless of her "technical contribution" talk (pointed out e.g. by her compatriot Dominic Sweetman in the Europarl hearing), of the uselessness of isolated "speech recognition patents", of the interests of SMEs on this subject, of Mandy Haberman's letter to the European Parliament^[1] etc.

In a letter to the Guardian of June 2003, McCarthy even attacks the GNU GPL as "just another form of monopolism". It seems that McCarthy may be interested in arousing flamewars and then presenting herself as a victim of unreasonable invectives. This can be a fairly successful strategy, because politeness standards are very high in the European Parliament and fellow MEPs may feel compelled to come to the rescue of an MEP who is being subjected to heated criticism.

McCarthy's proposals themselves do not look completely ghostwritten. At least the advocacy parts contain unmistakeable personal characteristics. Much of the amendment proposals themselves however is reminiscent of Anthony Howard (from CEC) and of industrial patent lawyers. Although some EPO officials have also visited McCarthy and even boasted in semi-public circles that they, together with McCarthy, would quickly get their point of view through the parliament, much of what McCarthy wrote in 2003 is more reminiscent of UK and CEC patent lawyers than of the EPO. Some of McCarthy's amendment proposals go slightly further than most at the EPO would in undermining patentability standards.

This appeal prepared the ground for another directive which the European Commission had put to the parliament at the request of phono industry and other lobby organisations and for which JF, herself an IP lobbyist with vested family interests (Vivendi, Aventis), got herself appointed as rapporteur. On June 5th 2003, McCarthy, wore a t-shirt "Piracy is not a victimless crime" to help lobby fellow MEPs to support her campaign. The campaign organiser IFPI, organisation of the phonographic industry, celebrated this climax of their campaign with a press release.

While IFPI and Vivendi are not likely to profit from software patents, they may feel some diffuse sympathy to anything that promises control of downstream economy, and they are of course, through various industry lobby organisations, in bed with the patent lobby. This diffuse and cozy sense of belonging to the same group of people is probably, more than any rational policy consideration, what binds McCarthy and the software patent lobby together.

phm 2003-08: McCarthy, Plooij in Seattle with EIF McCarth and a few other MEPs travel to Seattle to visit Microsoft together with the European Internet Foundation, a EU lobbying group financed by large corporations and designed to facilitate communication between MEPs and the Brussels representatives of thesese corporations.

At the EIF dinner after the software patentability hearing of 2003-11-07, McCarthy shared the table with a Brussels representative of Microsoft.

In her letter to the Guardian, McCarthy spreads Microsoft FUD about the GNU GPL, saying that it is just another form of monopoly and implying that non-free software needs patents.

At the OECD Conference on Aug 29 in Paris, Marie-Thérése Huppertz, who has been lobbying for software patents on behalf of Microsoftk, cited this McCarthy letter to the Guardian as an example of the thinking of a true European patriot.