anniversary

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

Today is the 1st anniversary of the CEC/BSA directive proposal's
publication.

Meanwhile ITRE seems to have voted largely in our favor, maintaining
and improving Plooij's counter-proposal, but stopping short of 
introducing a definition of what is technical.

Of course this counter-proposal still has many big holes through which
software and business method patents can be granted.  But it does
stiuplate that publication and use of the method for achieving
interoperatility cannot infringe.

Considering that the vote was preceded by intense lobbying from EICTA,
this result is quite encouraging.  After CULT, this is the second
position of an Europarl committee which shows some common sense.

Yet, we don't know to what extent this is more than symbolic.

The JURI commission has the biggest influence on this matter, and
seems to be firmly in the hand of the patent lobby so far.  McCarthy
believes that her main task is to "not be revolutionary" and "not
abuse the opportunity for criticsing the EPO", as some "lobbyists" are
doing.  Some JURI members perhaps don't understand the issue and
compensate this by asserting that we don't understand it.  They can
maintain this assertion by parotting EPO patent newspeak, which many
of us in fact to not understand.  But nor do they.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-12789608   
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
135,000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/