Neues 2003	Amazon 03-08-18	Porto 03-07-15	EP 03-06-26	noEPatents 03-06-22	JURI 03-06-17

CEOs of big telcos sign letter against Europarl Amendments

The chief executive officers of Alcatel, Ericsson, Nokia and Siemens have signed a letter to the European Commission and the European Council which complains about the European Parliament's amendments to the proposed software patent directive, saying that these will effectively remove the value of most of the patents of their companies and thereby harm the competitiveness of Europe's industry and violate the TRIPs treaty. FFII points out that the Directive indeed threatens the interests of the patent departments of such companies, but not of the comapnies themselves, and criticises that the letter is characterised by wild dogmatic assertions which say much about the thinking of patent departments and little about the interests of the undersigned companies, many of whose employees, especially software developpers, support the European Parliament's decision.