descr: Philippe Tamussino, independent legal counsellor to BSA, applauds the EU patent department's consultation paper and says that the BSA, which represents a lot of software companies, including those in the opensource business, is very much in favor of software patents. Does not supply any examples but only abstract reasoning, basically applauding what is written in the EC paper and reiterating a few nice-sounding formulas that are frequently heard on patent lawyer congresses and that could be viewed as political formulas designed to avoid offending BSA members while pleasing the single most important member of BSA, Microsoft. It should be noted that some BSA representatives have in the past expressed opposition to software patents, and that the primary concern of BSA is copyright enforcement. Moreover BSA is concerned with establishing regimes that can be accepted by the vendor as well as the customer and gaining moral support for these regimes. Software patents are not a regime that can add to the moral acceptance of the software IP system. This paper is apparently contrary to the interests of many if not most BSA members and not based on any process of opinion formation within BSA. title: Business Software Alliance Comments to the European Commission Consultation Paper on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions Thu: The text starts by lumping copyright and patents together and making an abstract statement of the type %(q:the more property the more innovation), which, although derided by %(ss:economists) for centuries, is still deeply rooted in conventional wisdom and even more so in the belief system of patent lawyers and the organisations on whose behalf they are trusted to speak. Often, a schism goes through the middle of an organisation, depending on whether the asked person is a lawyer or a programmer. It can therefore easily happen that in different branches of the same organisation opposing views are pronounced: Bat: Jamal Labed, president of BSA France, warns that software patents unfairly put small companies at a disadvantage. Tee: Our BSA patent law expert states: Bca: Basically Tamussino does little more than applauding and makes a few statements about the necessity of giving patent offices more money so as to assure high quality patent examination procedures. He closely follows the IBM position, according to which software is technical but business methods are not. Thus the EPO and the GDIM first get applause for discarding the only available limit to patentability, the %(ti:concept of technical invention), and then are commended for keeping some illogical fragments of this concept in order to prevent the system from stirring too much trouble and harming IBM. # Local Variables: ; # coding: utf-8 ; # srcfile: /ul/prg/src/mlht/app/swpat/eukonsult00.el ; # mailto: mlhtimport@a2e.de ; # passwd: XXXX ; # feature: swpatdir ; # dok: eukonsult00-bsa ; # txtlang: en ; # End: ;