Munich - The European Patent Office (EPO) has in recent years granted 30000 patents on programming problems, business ideas and organisational procedures. If national courts consistently followed the will of the EPO, it would no longer be legal to conduct automated medical diagnoses in Europe. The same applies to numerous mundane activities such as conducting of examinations in schools, bringing traders together at the stock exchange, generating purchasing lists from cooking recipes, setting prices dynamically, learning languages by comparing one's pronunciation with that of a teacher. All these activities infringe on European patents, as soon as they are implemented through software. Other EPO patents encumber network standards such as MIME and CGI and squatter the operating system level by occupying thousands of basic methods of memory arithmetics, making programming in these fields a hazardous endeavour. The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) has published a database of software patents granted by the EPO, together with some impressive examples, statistics and articles. The FFII's patent data specialist, Arnim Rupp, recommends that anybody discussing about software patents should first take a look at that database:

By browsing through the EPO's patents you will quickly find out that this has nothing to do with protecting software, let alone protecting innovative solutions. What this is really about is occupying complete problems. Fortunately for us, these hilariously trivial and gruesomely broad EPO patent claims are so far not necessarily enforcable before European courts. The American mega corporations, to whom most of these illegally granted patents belong, are still waiting for a change in the European Patent Convention. If the Diplomatic Conference sets the wrong signal in Munich next week, Germany will hopefully abide by the words of the Ministery of Justice and refuse to ratify the new European Patent Convention. The situation is serious enough to justify this. The European patent system will work one way or another. The issue at stake now is how to keep 30000 mines from detonating and how to give back basic legal security to European IT enterprises and citiziens.

For Daniel R�dding, CEO of a software enterprise in Paderborn, the situation is very serious:

By browsing the FFII's patent data base you can quickly grasp what software patents mean for most European IT companies today. On such a minefield small software companies hardly have any chance anymore. For my company I have already drawn the consequences: Starting from mid of next year we will conduct large parts of our software development in a country which does not yet have such a highly developped patent law system and in which a change of the legal situation cannot be expected for the near future. In certain fields the development of software is becoming too dangerous in Germany. Given the longterm legal risks, continuing with this activity in Germany would be irresponsible from a small entrepreneur's point of view.

So far already 200 software companies and 55000 signataries of the Eurolinux Petition have expressed themselves in a similar way. Meanwhile at the "Diplomatic Conference" patent representatives of 20 European countries will be negotiating about a "Base Proposal for the Revision of the European Patent Convention" drafted by EPO president Dr. Ingo Kober. Therein the EPO proposes among others to stipulate universal patentability (Art 52) and to confer special legislative rights on the administrative council of the EPO (Art 33). The rules or procedure have been determined by the EPO in such a way that national patent delegations can overrule individual items only by a 2/3 majority. Otherwise the will of the EPO will become legally binding in all European countries whose parliaments do not opt out of the European Patent Convention (EPC). The FFII will together with sponsoring software companies and system architects like Richard Stallman present its "European Software Patent Horror Gallery" on November 21 11-12:30 near the EPO in Forum der Technik, Helios conference room, and respond to questions from journalists. Richard Stallman has founded GNU project and the League for Programming Freedom, which has been arguing the case against software patentability in the USA since 1990.