Re: [Patents] Finnish organisations against CEC/BSA Directive Proposal

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

> >"Software patenting legislation in the United States was pushed
> >through by powerful lobby groups in the 1980s, with almost no
> >public discussion.   ..., says Mikko Valimaki, chairman of EFFi.
>
> Wrong.  Software patenting for the most part in America is a
> judicially determined policy, that is, a series of decisions from
> the US Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit in the 1980s and
> 1990s gradually opened up all of software to patenting.

Are judicial decisions some holy writ without any lobbying background?
Most of these judicial breakthroughs came in a climate of intense pressure
expressed through law journals, where everybody was clamoring to remove
limits on patentability, as if such limitations were "remnants from the
stone age" (Keukenschrijver) and in contradiction to all "modern"
co-design cosmology.

I could quote some of your writings from "PatNews" here.

You often say that software patents (or all kinds of "bad patents") are
here to stay because the mega corporations that control american politics
back them, and that all we can do is help patent offices improve their
novelty search capabilities.

I think you are drawing a false picture: it is the patent professionals
(lawyers, judges, patent busters) that hate to have any law imposing
restrictions on what can be patented.  Patent inflation is a result of the
patent movement's struggle for freedom (to patent whatever they want).
The patent movement is centered around lawyers (administrative, judicial,
legislative power all in one), and it has its allies in the patent
departments of large companies, who will keep struggling for more freedom
for their movement, until somebody from the industry wakes up and cares to
look what they are doing.  So far, the industry is sleeping, or, more
accurately said, doing its job, which is not politics but earning money.

In any case, I thinkg the finnish statement is accurate.  The judidial
development was a result of lobbying.  Maybe of a different kind than most
people suspect: less from the industry than from lawyers (the patent
movement).  But the press release doesn't say anything specific about
that.

The press release is slightly wrong in that it associates patent inflation
with the USA.  They may not have noticed that the EPO is granting the same
patents with the same movement pressing for them.  The whole purpose of
the current directive is to guarantee the freedom of this movement and
make sure that no judge will in the future find a legal basis for refusing
any patents.  The directive proposal builds several layers of safeguards
to assure this.

Thus MySQL & Co are still underestimating the wreckless nature of the
patent movement in Europe.  They are failing to warn about the home grown
forces of patent tyranny (patent movement pursuing its own freedom at the
expense of all others) waiting to be civilised by a political
counter-movement (which has failed to appear during so many years, because
most people were even less aware of it than the authors of the present
press release).

> I hope the rest of your arguments are less false.

Whose arguments?

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-12789608
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
120,000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/