Gregory AHARONIAN:

a professional patent buster who regularly publishes a newsletter called Internet Patent News Service (IPNS) with detailed information especially about software patents which should have failed the novelty test.

Wilfried ANDERS:

presiding judge at the 21st senate of the German Federal Patent Court (Bundespatentgericht), author of many articles in GRUR that advocate patentability of software. Known for his view that information has become a fourth physical force (vierte Naturkraft).

Jürgen BETTEN:

a Munich-based patent attorney, chairman of several software patent work groups of patent lawyer asssociations, passionate software patentability advocate, author of expert opinions ordered by the EPO, attorney in EPO procedings that brought about landmark decisions, has particularly many Japanese clients.

Kathrin BREMER:

head of the Bitkom workgroup on copyright and industrial property, successor of IBM patent attorney Teufel in this office, espoused views very similar to those of Teufel in a hearing in the German parliament in 2001-06

Frits BOLKESTEIN:

commissioner for the Internal Market of the European Commission starting in 2000 (?). Like his predecessor Monti, very eager to push the Community Patent. Delivered many speeches in front of patent lawyer audiences that echo the views of those audiences about the importance of patents, including software patents, for innovation.

Alexander CLELLAND:

a judge at the Technical Board of Appeal who participated in the framing of the decisions of 1998 which authorised computer program claims.

Axel HORNS:

a Munich-based patent attorney specialising in electronics and software who co-authored a German government-ordered study. Basically agrees with the EPO policy but has res reservation about program claims and proposes that software source code should be treated like a scientific publication. Has written several journal articles in this sense and also proposes it on his ipjur.com website, an ambitious collection of immaterial property related documentation.

Ingo KOBER:

president of the European Patent Office (EPO) since the mid-nineties, former FDP (liberal party) secretary of state in the BMJ (ministery of justice), active promoter of patentability expansion and of a monolingual Community Patent.

Gert KOLLE:

scholar of law dogmatics concerning computer programs. Kolle wrote his doctoral thesis at the MPI on this subject and published several deep-searching articles in GRUR from the early 70s to the early 80s. These articles confirmed the view of the courts that there is no room for patenting computer programs if the notion of technical invention is taken seriously. Later Kolle became an official at the European Patent Office. Currently he is their head of diplomacy, and he occasionally gives talks where he explains and justifies the current policy of the EPO.

Klaus MELULLIS:

a judge at the patent senate of the Bundesgerichtshof (BGH, Federal Court), lawyer by education, later became known as software patentability theoretician, seeking to follow the EPO's line of making software patentable, but still ambivalent in his wordings, showing a certain uneasiness about the potential consequences of his decisions, therefore expressed himself publicly against the plans to remove the patentability exception in november 2000.

Bernd LUTTERBECK:

a professor at Berlin Technical University specialising in informatics related law. Co-authored a government-ordered study on software patentability. Supports the policy of the European Patent Office (EPO) but advocates that publication of software source code should not be considered an infringement.

KONNO Hiroshi:

professor of mathematics, specialising in operations research, at Tokyo University. Wrote a very readable book about his experience with the Karmarkar patent in which he points out the inconsistencies and harmful effects of patenting math and software. Has tried to resist software patentability in Japan by filing a lawsuit against the Karmarkar patent.

John MOGG:

head of the European Commission's industrial property unit in the Directorate for the Internal Market, active promoter of software patentability, spiritus rector of the Greenpaper, author of speeches which show an exceptionally strong belief in the positive effects of "strong intellectual property".

Ralf NACK:

young scholar at the MPI, student of Straus. Ardent supporter of patentability of anything that runs on a computer, at least if it is related to a "tradition of engineering", e.g. algorithms that allow a computing task to be solved more efficiently. Nack has written a doctorate thesis, numerous GRUR articles and some AIPPI reports and participated in a government-ordered study on this subject. Nack insists that text must also be directly patentable because the intellectual achievement and not the form is important. He also insists that art 52 EPC is meaningless gibberish and must therefore be deleted, and that the traditional concept of technical invention is equally meaningless.

Axel PFEIFFER:

a German patent lawyer who often writes articles and participates in FFII mailing list discussion, telling people that both art 52 EPC and the concept of technical invention are meaningless and FFII/Eurolinux are misleading people.

Ronald RILEY:

an owner of several patents, some related to monorail constructions. Ardent defendor of "small inventors", hater of large enterprises which regularly "steal the intellectual property of small inventors", organiser of inventored.org, a lobby group for patent owners. Self-professed soul-mate of late patent king Lemelson. Proud of having had a decisive impact on election defeat of several US congressmen who tried to limit the rights of patent owners. Sees the ffii/eurolinux campaign as a plot by big business and claims that they or at least Hartmut Pilch must be financed by some large Japanese corporations.

Mark SCHAR:

one of the judges at the EPO's Technical Board of Appeal who brought about the landslide decisions of 1998, also wrote an article that explains the thinking behind those decisions and tries to redefine the concept of "technical invention" as "practical and repeatable problem solution".

Uwe SCHAREN:

one of the BGH judges who followed the EPO's lead in making software de facto patentable in Germany.

Daniele SCHIUMA:

patent attorney and patent law scholar at the MPI, together with Nack and Straus, argues that "new technologies" (usually citing some very impressive ultra-advanced examples) are unprotected without software patents, that patents should be available for anything that is at the forefront of R&D, that the constitutional right to private property extends to such things, and especially that art 27 TRIPS requires the deletion of the computer programs exclusion from art 52 EPC, no matter how that exclusion is interpreted. This is also called the "autonomous interpretation of TRIPS", a theory which is tied to Schiuma's name.

Jean-Paul SMETS:

french informaticist and economist, author of a comprehensive study on the problem of software patentability and of a book on free software. Argues against software patents from an economic and legal point of view, for the latter relying much on Vivant. His study, made in the name of the Conseil des Mines, is the only one that proposes and weighs alternative approaches to the codification of EPO practise, including a sui generis software law approach.

Josef STRAUS:

professor of patent law at MPI in Munich, promoter of gene and software patents, author of many articles and legal opinions for EPO and AIPPI, believes in the increasing importance of intellectual property in the knowledge economy, teacher of Nack and Schiuma, partipant in a study on software patentability ordered by the German government.

Wolfgang TAUCHERT:

head of the department at the German Patent Office that started to grow from near zero to several thousand applications per year when the German courts began emulating the EPO in allowing software patents. Tauchert supported this trend by articles in GRUR which argue in the same direction. In his interpretation, only source code is 'as such' while object code and algorithms are 'not as such'.

Stephen VAN DEN BERG:

presiding judge of most of the EPO's Technical Board of Appeal that legalised software patents

Michel VIVANT:

leading French software property law expert, has written many analytical articles about the erosion of the software patentability barrier at the EPO. Shows that art 52 EPC in syntactic and historical analysis clearly served to disallow patents on what the EPO now calls "computer-implementable inventions". Argues that these decisions have "only the value which courts may decide to attribute to them", which is a polite way of saying that they do not conform to correct methods of law interpretation.

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