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Software Patents in Greece

Patent Policy in Greece has been dominated by the Greek Patent Office. Even now, resistance seems to be coming only from Linux user groups. The number of greek signatories to the Eurolinux petition is among the lowest, far behind Poland. Greece's software industry seems to be among the weakest, and Greek companies have very nearly zero software patents at the EPO. Yet the Greek patent office firmly believes that "in the long term" austerity policies pay off. In 2000, the Greek patent administrators were among those who most firmly insisted on having "programs for computers" deleted from Art 52 EPC. In 2002 in the Council's talks they took a somewhat more cautious approach but ultimately followed the lead of UK and DE patent administrators in proposing to extend patentability beyond the scope of what the European Commission had foreseen. In May 2003, greek MEPs Koukiadhis and Tsatsos apparently supported the JURI amendments which further worsen the CEC directive proposal.

Greek Software Patents campaign launched: A group of activists from Linux user groups in Greece has built a website to campaign against the planned legalisation of software patents in Europe.
REU/DKPMA 2002/09/23: Änderungsvorschläge zum Softwarepatente-Richtlinienentwurf: The Council of the European Union (CEU) proposes to rewrite some articles of the CEC/BSA proposal of 2002/02/20 in order to take into account various criticisms made by national delegations to the Council's Intellectual Property Working Party, a workgroup consisting of delegates from national patent administrations. This counter-proposal was worked out by the delegates from Denmark, i.e. from the Danish Patent Office (DKPTO), which are presiding over the workgroup during the second half of 2002. The paper is the subject of decision at the Working Party's session on 2002/10/03 in Brussels. We present the paper in tabular comparison with the original CEC/BSA proposal of 2002/02/20. It becomes evident that the DKPTO proposal, while strengthening the rhetorical emphasis on the "technical contribution", creates additional ambiguities and in effect further widens the scope of patentability.
European Software Patent Statistics: This project aims to create tabular listings and statistics of the patents on programming tasks for the universal computer which the European Patent Office has been granting against the letter and spirit of the written law for the last few years. For reasons explained below, it is difficult to find out the precise number, but it seems the EPO must have granted at least 20-30,000 software patents.