2001年論理特許新事報導

The politicians at the european summit in Laeken confirmed their belief in the key role of the community patent for innovation and growth in Europe. They want to start another attempt on Dec 20th in order to realise the CP this year. The counter-arguments of the Eurolinux Alliance are meanwhile enjoying well-informed support, which however do not seem to have reached the patent politicians' negotiating rooms. Software patents were not an issue in Laeken, but according to current rumors, the Commissions' directorates are working together on a laxist directive which will legalise the current illegal practise of the European Patent Office and replace the current clear limits on patentability by empty words. The final negotiations about exactly which empty words to use are expected to yield results by january.

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The European Commission has published a deregulation whitebook in which it finds that 80000 pages of EC regulation are too much and promises to reduce this body by 25% within a few years. A German law professor suggests that the EC make it clear that the software patents granted by the EPO are illegal and will remain illegal. This would immediately remove 100,000 pages of harmful European regulation. If in patent matters the European Commission prefers red tape over the public interest, this may be seen as an indication of a general inability to deregulate.

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SP, The French trade union for education, science and informatics etc, expressed its fears that software patents will change the rules of the software economy in an undesirable way, thereby destroying huge European growth potentials and further strengthening the predominance of the motherland of software patents. Other informations' unions such as LST made similar statements earlier.

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During a press conference on December 4th at the IST event 2001 in Düsseldorf, the European Commission's Information Society commissioner Mr. Erkki Liikanen informed the press that a proposal on patents for computer programmes from the European Commission, DG Internal Market was due very soon. Mr. Liikanen said that there would not be patents on business methods but there would be patents on computer-implemented rules of organisation and calculation (programs for computers), provided that they had a technical effect. This seems to imply (a) allowing claims to information objects such as "computer program product", "computer program" and "data structure" (b) not demanding that the invention be a teaching of applied physical causality, not defining what is "technical" (c) allowing the EPO to continue granting patents for computerised business methods. It seems that the Comission intends to follow what the EC consultation report called the "economic majority" (i.e. patent departments of corporations such as LST) and go ahead legalising the americanised practise of the EPO without any meaningful restrictions and make it mandatory for all national jurisdictions.

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Informationswerke dürfen unmittelbar beansprucht werden, wenn es sich bei der darin enthaltenen Lehre um eine technische Lehre handelt. Hiermit hat der BGH der Patentinflation eine letzte Schleuse eröffnet, aber zugleich auch Wege zu einer möglichen künftigen Schließung der Schleuse angedeutet. D.h. der BGH hat virtuos geschlittert und ist auf beide mögliche Richtungen, in die in Brüssel demnächst entschieden werden könnte, begrifflich vorbereitet.

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Bilisimcümhüriyeti, a leading journal of the ICT sector in Turkey, published an interview on European devolpments concerning software patents with Eurolinux Alliance speaker Hartmut Pilch and placed it in on the webserver front page for several days. The interview incited some resonance, leading to a panel discussion at the Ankara Linux and Opensource Conference of 2001-12-07..8.

European patent politicians tend to portray the Community Patent project as a key to progress and prosperity in Europe. The innovativity of our economy, according to this view, seems to be a largely function of cheap availability and uniform enforcability of patents throughout the European Interior Market. The Eurolinux Alliance believes that the Community Patent according to current plans would stifle innovation and harm European citizens. Instead it must not be built as an extension to the current system maintained by the European Patent Office, but as a new lean, decentral, unbureaucratic foundation in the spirit of the Polluter Pays Principle. The Eurolinux position statement comes with an online signature guestbook.

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Since the end of september, there rumors have leaked out from the European Commission to patent movement circles, according to which the general directorates (internal market, competition, information society) have agreed to release a directive proposal this autumn. This proposal disallows claims to computer programs but does allow programs to be patented as processes. The patented process must represent a "technical contribution to the state of the art", but there is neither a definition of what is technical nor a clarification as whether only the contribution should be technical or the whole process that is claimed.

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While the European Commission is preparing a Directive about the limits of patentability, the European Patent Office (EPO) has announced new examination guidelines which sanction its current practise of allowing direct claims to computer programs and oblige examiners to apply this practise, which had been introduced by EPO judges at a low level in 1998 in anticipation of a change of law which later was was not carried out.

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The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has in a discussion paper explained the difficulties which it is encountering in an environment where basic calculation tasks are being patented. In order to motivate patent owners to cooperate, W3C proposes to allow "less basic" standards to be usable only against payment of "reasonable and non-discriminatory" of royalties to a consortium of patentees. This has sparked controversy, particularly because the burden could be unjustifiably onerous and completely exclude free/opensource software.

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Eine Arbeitsgruppe der CDU hat ein "Strategiepapier" für die Gestaltung und Nutzung des Internet in Deutschland veröffentlicht. Dieses Papier enthält eine kurze und widersprüchliche Passage zur Patent-Thematik. Die Arbeitsgruppe will die Laufzeit von Logikpatenten auf 5 Jahre reduzieren und weitere abfedernde Sonderregelungen einführen, um die angeblich aufgrund "internationaler Verpflichtungen" erforderliche Wahrung der "Rechte der Urheber" zu "ermöglichen". Offenbar wurde hier einiges missverstanden. Zudem scheint das Papier einem früheren Antrag der CDU/CSU-Fraktion zu widersprechen und auch in vielen anderen Punkten Ungereimtheiten aufzuweisen. Aus CDU-Kreisen war zu hören, dass dieses Papier noch diskutiert werde und keine offizielle Meinung der Partei oder der Fraktion darstellen solle.

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Das Präsidium der Gesellschaft für Informatik hat pünktlich zum Sommerloch (ca 25. Juli) seine Stellungnahme zur Konsultation der Europäischen Kommission zum Thema Softwarepatente erneut mit einer Presseerklärung bekannt gemacht.

In diesem von PA Springorum geschriebenen Papier setzt sich die GI für eine grenzenlose Patentierbarkeit von allen Organisations- und Rechenregeln (einschließlich Geschäftsmethoden) ein, die über einen Universalrechner realisiert werden können. Sie begründet diese Forderung allein mit veralteten rechtsdogmatischen Überlegungen, die der BGH und das Schrifttum bereits in den 70er Jahren kraftvoll widerlegt haben. Juristen, Ingenieure und Informatiker schütteln den Kopf.

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In 2001-01, the German Federal Ministery of Economy and Technology (BMWi) ordered a study on the economic effects of software patentability from well known think tanks with close affinity to the German patent establishment: the Fraunhofer Institute for Innovation Research (ISI.fhg.de), the Fraunhofer Patent Agency (PST.fhg.de) and the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Patent, Copyright and Competition Law (MPI = intellecprop.mpg.de). The study was largely concluded in 2001-06 and preliminary results were presented to a selected audience. The final report was published by the BMWi on 2001-11-15. The study is based on an opinion poll answered by several hundred software company representatives and independent software developpers, conducted by Fraunhofer ISI. Most respondents have had little experience with software patents and don't want software patents to become a daily reality like in the US. The poll also investigated the significance of open source software for these companies and found it to be of substantial importance as a common infrastructure. Based on these findings, the Fraunhofer authors predict that an increase in the use of software patents will put many software companies out of business and slow down innovation in the software field. The study then jumps to conclude that software patents must be legalised and SMEs must be better informed about them. This surprising conclusion is drawn by the patent law scholars from MPI. The MPI's legal study does not explore any ways to redraw the borders between patents and copyright but just takes the EPO and USPTO practise as an inevitable reality. They find that the EPO's caselaw is contradictory and chaotic and blame this on Art 52.2c EPC, which they say has failed to provide clear guidance and should therefore be deleted. Business related algorithms are, they say, less likely to be patented at the EPO than algorithms that "stand in a tradition of engineering". The MPI writers however do not try to provide a clear rule for distinguishing the two, and they oppose the idea of drawing a line between the physical and the logical ("technical inventions" vs "rules of organisation and calculation") as done by lawcourts in the 70s and 80s, asserting that information is also a physical phenomenon. They propose that all legislative power concerning the limits of patentability be handed over to the EPO, which should then, at its discretion and as far as Art 27 TRIPS allows, consult experts of interested parties for regular rewriting of its Examination Guidelines. Art 27 TRIPS demands that patents be "available in all fields of technology", and the MPI understands "technology" as "the useful arts" and is careful not to mention Kolle and other European theoreticians of the concept of technical invention. Summarily the study can be summarised as "Fraunhofer: software patents are unpopular in the software industry and dangerous to innovation and competition. MPI: Fine, so let's legalise them quickly."

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Around 1986 European manuals and commentaries of patent law unanimously explained that european patent law does not offer the software industry any chances of obtaining patents to protect its investments against imitators. Some complained that copyright was not enough, but yet agreed that the only way to change this situation was through legislation. Few noticed that the change was already underway: it was implied in ambiguous wordings of the European Patent Office's Examination Guidelines of 1985: the door was opened by a narrow slot for "computer programs with a technical effect", and the ground was prepared for further loosening of the concept of technical character, in a way that, according to the legal doctrines of the time, amounted to removing all overseeable limits on patentability. A year later, in 1986, the slot was widened into a visible breach by two decisions of the EPO's Technical Board of Appeal. Since then, the EPO has granted more than 30000 patents for (un)technical teachings that had previously been regarded as unpatentable "rules of organisation and calculation" or "computer programs as such". Judges and law scholars have meanwhile proposed various delimitation concepts in order to make sense of this somewhat chaotic caselaw development. This seminar aims to assess to what extent this has been achieved or can be achieved. We need to research into the space of innovations, as they are distributed along coordinates such as matter vs mind, laws of nature vs rules of calculation, concrete vs abstract, solution vs problem, trivial vs difficult, causal vs functional etc, and what kind of results various possible rules of delimitation tend to produce within this space. An empirical basis for this innovation cartography is provided by the patents which the EPO has granted during the last 15 years. A seminar on thursday 2001-07-05 at Linuxtag on the Stuttgart trade fair site and subsequent seminars, conducted by several interested associations, are expected to give rise to interesting new ideas in this intellectually intriguing and politically important interdisciplinary area.

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Im Bundestag stehen acht Fachleute aus den Bereichen Recht, Informatik und Wirtschaftswissenschaften zum Thema Softwarepatentierung den Abgeordneten Rede und Antwort stehen, nachdem sie schriftliche Stellungnahmen zu einer Reihe von Fragen abgegeben haben. Die interessierte Öffentlichkeit war ebenfalls aufgerufen, in schriftlicher Form zu diesen Fragen Stellung zu nehmen. Wir veröffentlichen hier das Gesprächsprotokoll und die schriftlichen Eingaben.

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Am 6. Juni 2001 beginnt in Den Haag eine neue Verhandlungsrunde zur Erweiterung des Hager Übereinkommens, welches die Vollstreckung ausländischer Urteile in bestimmten Bereichen erlaubt und regelt. Einem dem FFII vorliegenden aktuellen Entwurf zufolge sollen Angelegenheiten des Wirtschaftsrechts und insbesondere der Immaterialgüterrechte (Patent-, Urheber-, Markenrecht) nun in den Bereich des Hager Übereinkommens mit aufgenommen werden. Der FFII fordert, Informationsdelikte ebenso wie das Seerecht weiterhin aus dem Bereich des Hager Übereinkommens auszusparen.

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Bundesjustizministerin Herta Däubler-Gmelin erklärte sich in einem Zeitungsbericht vom 3. Mai zufolge "vehement gegen Softwarepatente" und erteilte Plänen der Generaldirektion Binnenmarkt, die Praxis des europäischen Patentamts durch eine Richtlinie zu kodifizieren, eine Absage. Ähnlich hatten sich zuvor bereits der französische Wirtschaftsminister, Christian Pierret, die britische Kollegin Patricia Hewitt und das niederländische Parlament geäußert. Während das Patentreferat im Bundesministerium der Justiz (BMJ) Kommentare und Diskussionen zum Thema Softwarepatente in Deutschland meidet, hat das Bundesministerium für Wirtschaft und Technologie (BMWi) einiges getan, um die Diskussion zu zu vertiefen. Dabei geht das BMWi äußerst rücksichtsvoll mit den etablierten Mächten der Patentbewegung um. 2000 ließ sich das BMWi durch ein Gutachten bescheinigen, dass Softwarepatente unvermeidbar seien. Ein weiterer Auftrag erging Anfang 2001 an eine Bietergemeinschaft von bewährten Sprachrohren der Patentbewegung. Auch bei diesem Gutachten ist zu erkennen, dass es sich an die Sprachregelungen der Patentbewegung hält. In anderen europäischen Ländern ist die Situation ähnlich. Der FFII hat daher Konsultationsfragen erarbeitet, die Anhörungen und Gutachten auf die Sprünge helfen könnten.

Durch ein im Eilverfahren zu verabschiedenes Gesetz zur Förderung des Patentwesens an den Hochschulen und ein dazugehöriges Gesetz zur Änderung des Gesetzes über Arbeitnehmererfindungen soll das Recht des Hochschullehrers, seine Forschungsergebnisse der Öffentlichkeit zur Verfügung zu stellen, restlos abgeschafft werden. Der Hochschullehrer wird verpflichtet, alles, was möglicherweise patentrechtlich verwertbar sein könnte, der Patentverwaltung seiner Hochschule zu melden, bevor er darüber schreibt. Die Patentverwaltung, die mit staatlicher Anschubfinanzierung bis ca 2003 aufgebaut werden soll, verfügt dann über alles "geistige Eigentum". Die Einwilligung der Professoren in ihren Verlust an Freiheit und Würde wird ihnen durch Vorteilsgewährung versüßt: sie erhalten 30% der erwirtschafteten Einnahmen.

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Die Weltorganisation für Geistiges Eigentum plant für April und Mai 2001 einige Verhandlungsrunden, die darauf zielen, Patente weltweit leichter erhältlich und durchsetzbar zu machen und die Rechte der Patentinhaber auf der Ebene des Völkerrechts festzuschreiben, so dass kein einzelner Staat sie mehr einschränken kann. Insbesondere der Entwurf zu einem Vertrag über das Materielle Patentrecht läuft darauf hinaus, das Patentrecht dauerhaft unreformierbar zu machen.

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