[tlug] Software patents - fresh news and call for action

["Lyle (Hiroshi) Saxon" <ronfaxon@example.com>]

This is from a Mandrake newsletter - I don't think they would have any
objection to being quoted on this list, as our interests are the same.
How significant is this issue I wonder?

- LHS




Flash: Software patents - fresh news and call for action

As a follow-up to our latest flash regarding the upcoming decision of
the European Council to legalize software patentability in Europe,
here are some fresh news and information on what you can do to help.

If nothing changes, tomorrow, Tuesday May 18, the European Council,
that is, the European body which represents all the governments of the
European Union, will vote in favor of a directive that will legalize
software patents in Europe. Last September, faced with a similar
choice, the European Parliament voted major amendments to the
directive text drafted by the European Commission, actually rejecting
software patentability. However, the Council, ignoring all of these
amendments, is going to vote in favor of a text that is even worse
than the initial version of the Commission.

Why can the Council take a decision which will be so harmful to the
European software industry? Unlike the Parliament, which is a place
open to the public, where Members of the European Parliament have
had time to study the proposal and hear many positions on the issue
in order to take a well-thought decision, the Council is a closed
body where, due to the alledged complexity of the subject,
representatives of the governments have handed out the file to
committees of experts.

These experts, who re-drafted the text and wrote position papers on
why to vote it, are in fact mostly representatives from the national
patent offices, backed by the heads of the legal departments of some
big industrial companies, all of whom have a common interest: more
patents mean more power for them, irrespective of the harm that will
be done to the economy at large, and even to their own companies. In
the name of "the Industry" and of "innovation", they manipulated the
political decision-makers to make them believe that the new text did
not allow to patent pure software, that it was a good compromise between
the Commission and Parliament texts, and that not all of the
parliamentary amendments could be kept because some of them were
illegal with respect to international treaties such as TRIPS. All of
this is plain lie.

In fact, if voted, the text of the Council would lead to a situation
where big companies with large patent portfolios use these to lock
their respective markets and prevent competition from innovative SMEs,
and where "intellectual property" companies that do not create any
software use their own patent portfolios to collect license fee rents
from everybody. This is the situation which is happening in the US,
putting at risk its successful software industry. This is what may
just happen in Europe in a few months.

However, it is not too late. Because of growing pressure from computer
professionals and from the public, and because they get more and more
feed-back from the media, political decision-makers begin to get aware
of the issues, and to have doubts about the sincerity of the patent
lobby. In some countries, they have taken the file back from the
patent offices
http://lwn.net/Articles/85379/
http://kwiki.ffii.org/?SwpatcninoEn
and some countries of the Council have just decided to switch from a
voting procedure without debate to a voting procedure with debate,
as the text gets less and less consensus among the members of the
European Union.

You can convince even more of them to reject software patentability.
In order to do that, please take some time to read about the issues
at stake, and spread the information across your friends and business
contacts, the press, your members of the parliament and your government.
It is essential that elected policy makers get back into command of the
situation and do not leave the patent offices decide alone.

Here are some texts which can help you to present the issues to the
media and to convince policy-makers of all countries of the European
Union.

A very readable analysis by François Pellegrini explaining
the legal and economic issues of software patentability:
http://www.abul.org/article191.html

A thorough analysis by Jonas Maebe of the difference between
the three versions of the directive, and why software patents
are indeed illegal with respect to TRIPS:
http://www.elis.ugent.be/~jmaebe/swpat/councilanalysis/paper-en.pdf

Positions of the member countries of the European Union:
http://swpat.ffii.org/akteure/  (add "pt", "ie", "fr",
"de", "be", "gr", etc to have the positions of the
member countries)

The page of the FFII giving some directions for actions:
http://kwiki.ffii.org/?LtrSmePolit0405En

A recent paper published in the Washington Post describing the
current situation in the United States:
"Patenting Air or Protecting Property? Information Age Invents a New
Problem"
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54548-2003Dec10?language=printer

31 companies sued for using the JPEG image format (the plaintiff
filed for a patent while recommending the adoption in international
bodies of a standard including its patented technology):
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,63200,00.html%3Ftw%3Dwn_bizhead_1

A US company sues companies of on-line content distribution:
http://www.e-data.com/
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5205529.html
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5144097.html

A well-documented file on the reference site Law.com:
http://www.law.com/jsp/statearchive.jsp?type=Article&oldid=ZZZV4RVSSPC

Thank you very much for your help.

	Mandrakesoft Online Team.

------------------------------------------------------------------
The Mandrake Linux Community Newsletter is available in English, French,
German, Spanish, Dutch, Portuguese, and Russian. Please select the following
link to:
* Request a different language for the next newsletter
* Receive the next newsletter in a different format (plain text or HTML)
* Unsubscribe to the newsletter
http://mandrake.com/cgi-bin/regnl.pl?em=ronfaxon%40mxm.mesh.ne.jp&ctr=n