Strasbourg 2003/09/23

EP 03/09	Munich	Brussels	Strasburg	Madrid	Bologna	Vienna	London	Berlin	Stuttgart

Details
Contact
About the Eurolinux Alliance -- www.eurolinux.org
About the FFII -- www.ffii.org
About Strasbourg Linux User Group -- strasbourg.linuxfr.org
Permanent URL of this Press Release

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The Proposal for a software patent directive, which will be submitted to the European Parliament for decision on September 23nd, is giving rise to yet another wave of protests throughout Europe.

The Greens/EFA in the European Parliament organise a press conference in Brussels on 17 September with an impressive list of guests.

The LUG of Strasbourg, together with the FFII and the Eurolinux Alliance are calling for participation in a rally comprising a street performance in Strasbourg on September 23nd, starting at 11.00 from Place Kleber and going to the European Parliament. This action will be accompanied by online demonstrations.

Behind the organisers is a coalition of organisations representing 2000 software companies and 250,000 individuals, mostly software professionals.

"On August 27th, a rally in and near the European Parliament in Brussels attracted 500 participants. Leaders of the scientific communities and software business world have taken the directive proposal apart and condemned it in every respect during the last few mongth. This has however left some influential groups in the Parliament unimpressed. It still seems likely that the Parliament will pass a directive on September 24th which renders broad patents on trivial algorithms and business methods, such as Amazon One Click Shopping, legal and uniformly enforcable in Europe," explains Guy Brand, organiser of the Strasburg rally. "The EPO has granted more than 30,000 patents of this type against the letter and spirit of the written law, of which more 70% are held by companies from US and Japan. By unleashing these patents, Europe would mutilate the most vital sectors of its economy. More and more people are now seeing this very clearly. We expect a new record number of participants this time."

The event in Strasbourg on Tuesday 23rd of September, organised by local groups together with FFII/Eurolinux, is structured as follows:

When	Where	What?
11.00-11.30	Place Kléber	Rally in the streets of Strasbourg marching to the European Parliament
12.30-14.00	EP	Demonstration in front of the European Parliament with performance, balloons, patent chain, speeches.

"The vast majority of our supporters will certainly not be on Place Kléber on September 23nd, or at any of the satellite demonstrations. Those who can not come to Strasbourg should demonstrate online, using their web servers or other internet services", says Hartmut Pilch, president of FFII. "We have proposed a series of ways in which this can be done. There is certainly a way for everyone. Better make access to your webpage a bit more difficult now for one or two days than lose your freedom of publication for the next ten years. If the rapporteurs of the big party groups have their way, copyright and freedom of publication will become worthless. Programmers and Internet Service Providers may become regular targets for cease-and-desist letters and patent lawsuits. If the JURI report is not drastically amended, paragraph by paragraph, we will be stuck with a system of unlimited patentability of software and business methods in Europe for the next 10 years, and our software industry will be at the mercy of a few large companies, mostly of US and Japanese origin, who hold 2/3 of the software and business method patents which the European Patent Office (EPO) has been illegally granting since 1986. The deadline for democratic scrutiny is scheduled for September 24th, and the Action Week may well be your last chance to make your voice heard in the European patent decisionmaking process."

contact

mail:

media at ffii org

phone:

Guy Brand +33-3-90245102 (Strasburg)

Hartmut Pilch +49-89-18979927 (Munich)

More Contacts to be supplied upon request

About the Eurolinux Alliance -- 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 copyright, 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 MS Windows.

About the FFII -- www.ffii.org

The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) is a non-profit association registered in Munich, which is dedicated to the spread of data processing literacy. FFII supports the development of public information goods based on copyright, free competition, open standards. More than 300 members, 700 companies and 50,000 supporters have entrusted the FFII to act as their voice in public policy questions in the area of exclusion rights (intellectual property) in data processing.

About Strasbourg Linux User Group -- strasbourg.linuxfr.org

The LUG of Strasbourg is a group of Linux and Open Source Software users in Strasbourg. This group works for popular education through Open Source Software adoption by every one by organizing conferences, information stands, presentations and install-parties opened to the public.

Permanent URL of this Press Release

http://swpat.ffii.org/events/2003/europarl/09/strasbourg/index.en.html

links

AelWiki: Strasburg Event Planning

World-editable webspace provided by ael.be for planning the demonstration in Strasburg 2003/09/23.

Action Week against EU Software Patent Plans

The Proposal for a software patent directive, which will be submitted to the European Parliament for decision on September 24th, is giving rise to yet another wave of protests. These include a conference in Brussels on Wednesday September 17th, a rally in Strasbourg on Tuesday September 23nd, as well as a series of "satellite demos" in other cities of Europe. These actions will be accompanied by an Internet Strike on the 17th and 23rd. At a comparable action on Aug 27, 500 demonstrators came to Brussels and 3000 websites went on strike.

EU Software Patent Directive Amendment Proposals

The European Commission proposed on 2002-02-20 to consider computer programs as patentable inventions and make it very difficult not to grant a patent on an algorithm or a business method that is claimed with the typical features of a computer program (e.g. computer, i/o, memory etc). We have worked out a counter-proposal that upholds the freedom of computer-aided reasoning, calculating, organising and formulating and the copyright property-based property rights of software authors while supporting the patentability of technical inventions (problem solutions involving forces of nature) according to the differentiations that have been laid down in the European Patent Convention (EPC), the TRIPs treaty and the classical patent law literature. This counter-proposal is receiving support from numerous prominent players in the fields of software, economics, politics and law.

JURI 2003/04-6 Amendments: Real and Fake Limits on Patentability

Members of the European Parliament's Commission on Legal Affairs and the Internal Market (JURI) submitted amendments to the European Commission's software patent directive proposal. While some MEPs are asking to bring the directive in line with Art 52 EPC so as to clearly restate that programs for computers are not patentable inventions, another group of MEPs is endorsing the EPO's recent practice of unlimited patentability, shrouded in more or less euphemistic wordings. Among the latter, some propose to make programs directly claimable, so as to ensure that software patents are not only granted but achieve maximal blocking effects. This latter group obtained a 2/3 majority, with some exceptions. We document in tabular form what was at stake, what various parties recommended, and what JURI finally voted for on 2003/06/17.

Why Amazon One Click Shopping is Patentable under the Proposed EU Directive

According to the European Commission (CEC)'s Directive Proposal COM(2002)92 for "Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions" and the revised version approved by the European Parliament's Committee for Legal Affairs and the Internal Market (JURI), algorithms and business methods such as Amazon One Click Shopping are without doubt patentable subject matter. This is because

Any "computer-implemented" innovation is in principle considered to be a patentable "invention".
The additional requirement of "technical contribution in the inventive step" does not mean what most people think it means.
The directive proposal explicitly aims to codify the practise of the European Patent Office (EPO). The EPO has already granted thousands of patents on algorithms and business methods similar to Amazon One Click Shopping.
CEC and JURI have built in further loopholes so that, even if some provisions are amended by the European Parliament, unlimited patentability remains assured.

Program Claims: Bans on Publication of Patent Descriptions

Patent Claims to "computer program, characterised by that upon loading it into memory [ some process ] is executed", are called "program claims", "Beauregard claims", "In-re-Lowry-Claims", "program product claims", "text claims" or "information claims". Patents which contain these claims are sometimes called "text patents" or "information patents". Such patents no longer monopolise a physical object but a description of such an object. Whether this should be allowed is one of the controversial questions in the struggle about the proposed EU Software Patent Directive. We try to explain how this debate emerged and what is really at stake.

Interopérabilité et Brevet: Controverse au Parlement européen

Art 6 of the proposed software patent directive pretends to impose a limit on patent enforcement to safeguard interoperability. Art 6a, which was inserted by the European Parliament and approved by all three concerned committees, actually does impose a gentle but real limit. It says that filters for conversion from one format to another may always be used, regardless of patents. Unfortunately even this limit has provoked a furious backlash from corporate patent lawyers, seconded by large IT associations and governments (whose patent policy is usually formulated by corporate patent lawyers). After the summer pause of 2003, Arlene McCarthy MEP proposed an amendment to Art 6a which would render Art 6a meaningless. The movement against Art 6a was joined by Wuermeling (EPP), Manders (ELDR) as well as the governments of UK and US. Yet explanations as to what is wrong with the Interoperability Privilege remain very vague. We explain the meaning of Art 6a and the different amendments under discussion.

英国政府、欧州議会において特許強加の極端路線を提唱

Le ministère des affaires étrangères du Royaume-Uni fait circuler un "compte-rendu aux MPE britanniques", dans lequel il enjoint aux membres du Parlement Européen britanniques de soutenir la position de Arlene McCarthy et de voter (1) contre toute tentative de définir ce qui est technique ou qui limite en quoi que ce soit ce qui est brevetable (2) contre l'article 6a qui permet l'écriture de convertisseurs lorsque les standards sont brevetés (3) pour l'article 5 de la JURI qui interdit la publication des descriptions d'inventions brevetées sur le Net. L'intervention du gouvernement survient alors que McCarthy a montré des signes de nervosité en voyant l'amenuisement du soutien de son parti. La déclaration du gouvernement peut être attribuée à l'Office des Brevets Britannique et son groupe de travail politique, essentiellement constitué d'avocats en brevets de grandes sociétés. Ce groupe a déterminé la politique de brevets logiciels du Royaume-Uni et largement aussi celle de l'Union Européenne ces dernières années.

Arlene McCarthy 2003/09/01: "The Myths - The Truth"

In response to the wave of protests against the proposed software patent directive COM(2002)92 2002/0047 in late August 2003, the European Parliament's rapporteur for this directive, Arlene McCarthy MEP, has published a "Factsheet" which attempts to explain that she has been a victim of a "misinformation campaign" and is in reality championning the protesters' cause. We republish the paper with comments here.

Pamphlets

Proposition de directive sur la protection de la propriété intellectuelle COM (2003) 46(01)

Also, a debate on the IP Enforcement Directive is scheduled for 03/09/11. This directive, in combination with modifications to the software patent directive pushed by its rapporteur Janelly Fourtou, would threaten anyone who publishes a program on the Internet with criminal prosecution. FFII is supporting experts who are staying in the Parliament and organising events in and around the Parliament.