FFII Logic Patent News

The German Minister of Justice expressed vehement opposition against software patents in an interview and criticised contray plans of the patent lawmakers in Brussels. French industry minister Christian Pierret and British e-minister Patricia Hewitt expressed similar concerns earlier. The Dutch parliament decided that before any possible legalisation of software patents a rule for securing an appropriate level of inventivity would have to be found, and installed a workgroup, whose recommendations we report in our article CR.

In view of these developments the Brussels initiative to legalise software patents via a EU directive has temporarily come to a halt. The consultation was also interrupted and its results published only as piecemeal. We have collected the scraps and reported in detail about the background. We must expect the European Commission's Industrial Property Unit to come up with another initiative for a pro software patent directive this fall.

At an expert hearing in the German Parliament the consensus of all german political parties against software patents was reinforced. The PET is now supported by more than 80000 signatories, 2000 chief responsible officers of IT enterprises and 300 companies. According to experts from politik-digital.de this is the largest cyber-right signature campaign in the Internet so far. The second-largest was directed against spam and had 30000 signatures.

Leading institutes that study legal questions of patent law, such as the Max Planck Institute for International Patent Copyright and Competition Law in Munich, meanwhile continue to plead for patentability of computer programs. A consortium of such institutes has completed a research study on this question. Earlier, professor Lutterbeck of Berlin Technical University worked out a study for the same ministery, in which he also said that patentability cannot be limited in a reasonable way.

Seit Anfang 2000 haben einige Patentrechtler dem EPA-Kurs in in Fachartikeln (GRUR) widersprochen, die "Liberalisierungs"-Entscheidungen des BGH ("Tauchcomputer", "Sprachanalyse", "Logikverifikation") kritisiert und eine Rückkehr zum Begriff der technischen Erfindung gefordert. Gleichzeitig hat der "stockkonservative" 17. Senat des Bundespatentgericht (BPatG) erneut ein Softwarepatent wegen mangelnder Technizität zurückgewiesen und eine Rechtsbeschwerde zum BGH zugelassen. In ähnlicher Weise hatte das BPatG im August 2000 Computerprogramm-Patentansprüche grundsätzlich abgelehnt und dem Anmelder IBM eine Rechtsbeschwerde zum BGH gestattet. Inzwischen hat der BGH entschieden und ist dabei einen Schritt vorwärts und zwei zurück gegangen, sofern man eine lineare Progression in Richtung Patentinflation als Zeitachse zugrunde legt.