TRIPs lie: the UNICE version

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

>       http://swpat.ffii.org/analysis/trips/
>
> If you have any good articles for an obligation to allow software patents
> due to TRIPs, please show them to me.

The most recent TRIPs related patent lawyer bullshit is found in an
official statements of UNICE (european industry association) which claims
that Art 5 of the Directive proposal goes against TRIPs in not allowing
"program product" claims.

TRIPs does say that all technical inventions, whether products or
processes, should be patentable.  But evidently, even if you treat
calculation as a field of technology (as some recent american habit of
corporate PR boasting does), the product of a calculation is not a
computer program.  The computer program is a description of the
calculation, and TRIPs certainly doesn't stipulate that the descriptions
of processes must be patentable.

We can only say that UNICE is using the TRIPs lie in potentiation: a lie
within a lie.  The UNICE paper shows just what a hard time the corporate
patent lawyers in charge of speaking for UNICE must be having in trying to
drum up arguments in support of software patents.

And of course that UNICE is making false claims about the european
industry and abouts its own processes of forming representative opinions
on behalf of the european industry.  The people in charge at UNICE should
be held accountable for this under civil and penal law.  Their behavior is
a kind of misappropriation of public representative functions which are
specially protected by legal standards at least in some countries.

The European Commission legitimates its own position in the
directive case mainly by reference to UNICE.

The TRIPs lie is not much more than a part of a certain stream of
political crime which has unfolded in Europe in recent years.  There is no
substance to it at all, not in the least.  Wherever you find it, you can
be sure that you are finding political crime somewhere near it.

-- 
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/