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#title: CEC 2003/11: Secret Nitpicking on European Parliament's Amendments

#descr: The Industrial Property Unit of the Commission of the European
Communities (CEC) had stated in October 2003 that it finds the
European Parliament's Amendments to its software patent directive
proposal mostly inacceptable.  In a confidential document distributed
to EU member state governments in November 2003, the Commission's
patent officials added some critical notes about each of the
amendments of the European Parliament.  The Commision points out that
the text deviates from the practise of the European Patent Office in
its use of the terminology and in its reasoning.  This is enough for
the Commission to find the Parliament's text inacceptable.  Rather
than examine the the merits of the Parliament's versus the EPO's
approach, the Commission treats the EPO's approach as the absolute
authority that must be followed and tries to find fault in the
Parliament's legal logic, mostly by misunderstanding this logic or
claiming that it is unclear or that it is at odds with some
established practise.  Some of these claims are provably untrue.  The
Commission's own proposal has been heavily criticised by prominent
patent law experts for its incoherence and lack of clarity.

#WKl: Dr. Klaus-Jürgen Melullis

#net: presiding judge

#Sno: Patent Senate

#aWJ: German Federal Court of Justice

#iln: Article published in 2002

#nWp: In particular, it seems to me that the Pension Benefits decision
significantly shifted the interface between
the assessment of
statutory subject-matter and of inventive step without any
consideration of whether such a shift was compatible with existing
case law. I find it regrettable therefore that the rationale of
Pension Benefits has been so rapidly adopted in both the EPO
Guidelines and also the proposed Directive on software patents.

#lov: Dr. Simon Davies

#Wnw: UK patent lawyer

#hvn: Chair of the Forum on Software Inventions at the European Patent
Office

#WWi: The Commission is unable to cope with this new expression of technical
novelty, and to fit that in with its existing structure of three
pillars, either under the heading novelty, or inventiveness, or
industrial application. And for this reason, the Commission's text
requires clarification, or indeed, correction. I can only describe the
Commission's text, moreover, as miserable.

#loy: Willy Rothley MEP

#dsp: vice president of the European Parliament's Legal Affairs Commission
(JURI)

#e0k: speech 2003-06-16)

#nme: number

#EUPL: EP

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