Software Patent Hearing 2003/07/15 in Porto

[Hartmut Pilch <phm@a2e.de>]

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                  Software Patent Hearing 2003/07/15 in Porto

                     Brussels, Lisbon, Porto 2003/07/11

                           For Immediate Release

   The Municipality of Porto in Portugal is conducting a hearing on July
   15th about the possible effects of the proposed European Software
   Patent Directive on companies and citizens in Portugal. The hearing is
   chaired by Ilda Figueiredo, member of the European Parliament.

Details

   The hearing will take place at

     Auditório da Junta de Freguesia de Miragaia

     Campo dos Martires da Pátria nº 22 Porto, Portugal

     July 15th 15:00.

   Participants need to register only at the entrance.

   Felix Gaehtgens, CEO of [12]Symlabs Inc from Lisbon, who spoke at a
   recent hearing in the European Parliament on the subject of software
   patents, explains:

     Portugal is a great place for developping software. We have smart
     people here, working hard, with relatively low labor costs. Any
     group of 5-10 good developpers can turn out nifty things and make a
     lot of money, relying on copyright and fast reaction to market
     demands. Our comany has gained a leading position in this way.
     According to the laxist standards proposed by the European
     Parliament's Legal Affairs Commission, we could have obtained
     plenty of patents on our software innovations, and we have indeed
     obtained some such patents in the US. The only reason that we do
     this is because in the US you need to play the "patent game". We
     have no intention of enforcing these patents ourselves - they serve
     only for protecting ourselves against bigger players who have many
     patents themselves -- in some cases, where bigger players find you
     "infringing" one of their extremely stupid and obvious patents, and
     you have another extremely stupid and obvious patent yourself, you
     can cross-license. The whole issue is completely stupid. Patents
     make sense in the chemical industry perhaps, but not in software.

     If the Legal Affairs Committee has its way, the US patent game will
     be imposed on us in Europe, and productivity in software
     development will be greatly reduced, in particular in countries
     like Portugal. This appears to be intended by some in the European
     Parlamennt's Legal Affairs Committee. MEP Arlene McCarthy's draft
     report focusses on the interests of large telecommunication
     companies with thousands of patents. She has added a recital which
     says that Europe must impose high legal costs (McCarthy's report
     recommends that about 10% of development cost should be spent for
     patenting only) in order to be able to compete with "low-cost
     economies". Portugal is a "low-cost economy" and we can not afford
     high legal costs.

     We see this directive as a direct assault on our livelihood and
     interests, a sneaky attempt to steal our intellectual property and to
     prevent us from competing. Bloated corporations with big legal
     departments, mostly located in what McCarthy would call "high-cost
     economies", are trying to gain control of the jewels of Portugal's and
     in fact Europe's software inudstry. They are making sure that broad and
     trivial patents on algorithms and business methods, as granted by the
     EPO, can no longer be challenged in Europe. Bogus requirements, such as
     that a "computer-implemented invention" should "make a technical
     contribution in its inventive step", do not prevent the enforcement of
     broad and trivial patents on algorithms and business methods. Rather,
     they prevent people from figuring out what is going on, and that may
     well be the intention behind these awkward formulas.

     We therefore call on our Portuguese colleagues: Wake up and Catch the
     Thief! There is no time to lose! Join hands now with MEP Ilda Figureido
     and with all other politicians who are willing to defend the interests
     of Portugal's software creators and citizens!

   Jaime Villate, who represents the [13]Portuguese Free Software
   Association ANSOL and the Eurolinux Alliance at the hearing, explains:

     Most employment in the IT sector in Portugal is created by
     companies of a size below 50 employees. Portuguese companies do not
     own a single one of the more than 30000 patents on algorithms and
     business methods that have been illegally granted by the European
     Patent Office (EPO) in Munich. Most people in these companies have
     protected their investments by means of copyright. The idea that an
     algorithm can be owned is completely unheard of to them and
     contrary to their ethics. When faced with the broad and trivial
     patents on abstract ideas which the EPO has been granting, they
     usually just say "You're kidding". It is very difficult to get
     people to face the reality that has been created in Munich and
     Brussels and that will wind down on us if we don't wake up now.
     Although the hearing was set up very late and hastily, we urge
     everybody to participate.

About Symlabs Inc -- www.symlabs.com

   Symlabs defines itself as "an energetic collection of bright and
   gifted software engineers". These engineers have worked together as a
   team on various large directory development and deployment projects
   throughout Europe, United States and Japan. Some of Symlabs' major
   clients include Vodafone UK, Vodafone Global Content Services (VGCS),
   Vodafone Spain and Vodafone Portugal. Witnessing first hand some of
   the repetitive challenges that these organizations were experiencing
   in their directory services and applications, it was decided that a
   valuable service could be offered in this specialized area. Symlabs
   began operations in a high-tech technology park in Lisbon, Portugal
   and has branched out to include its new headquarters in San Francisco,
   California, and an office in Madrid, Spain. Symlabs has since then
   evolved to become a middleware development company specializing in the
   development of LDAP directory solutions and directory development
   productivity tools.

About ANSOL -- www.ansol.org

   ANSOL is the National Association for Free Software (Associação
   Nacional para o Software Livre). It is a portuguese non-profit
   association with the purpose of divulging, promoting, developping,
   investigating and studying Free Informatics and its social, political,
   philosophical, cultural, technical and scientific implications.

About the Eurolinux Alliance -- www.eurolinux.org

   The EuroLinux Alliance for a Free Information Infrastructure is an
   open coalition of commercial companies and non-profit associations
   united to promote and protect a vigourous European Software Culture
   based on copyright, open standards, open competition and open source
   software such as Linux. Corporate members or sponsors of EuroLinux
   develop or sell software under free, semi-free and non-free licenses
   for operating systems such as GNU/Linux, MacOS or MS Windows.

Permanent URL of this Press Release

   http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/port0711/index.en.html

Annotated Links

   -> [14]JURI votes for Fake Limits on Patentability
          The European Parliament's Committee for Legal Affairs and the
          Internal Market (JURI) voted on tuesday morning about a list of
          proposed amendments to the planned software patent directive.
          It was the third and last in a series of committee votes, whose
          results will be presented to the plenary in early september.
          The other two commissions (CULT, ITRE) had opted to more or
          less clearly exclude software patents. The JURI rapporteur
          Arlene McCarthy MEP (UK socialist) also claimed to be aiming
          for a "restrictive harmonisation of the status quo" and
          "exclusion of software as such, algorithms and business methods
          from patentability". Yet McCarthy presented a voting list to
          fellow MEPs which, upon closer look, turns ideas like "Amazon
          One-Click Shopping" into patentable inventions. McCarthy and
          her followers rejected all amendment proposals that try to
          define central terms such as "technical" or "invention", while
          supporting some proposals which reinforce the patentability of
          software, e.g. by making publication of software a direct
          patent infringment, by stating that "computer-implemented
          inventions by their very nature belong to a field of
          technology", or by inserting new economic rationales
          ("self-evident" need for Europeans to rely on "patent
          protection" in view of "the present trend for traditional
          manufacturing industry to shift their operations to low-cost
          economies outside the European Union") into the recitals. Most
          of McCarthy's proposals found a conservative-socialist 2/3
          majority (20 of 30 MEPs), whereas most of the proposals from
          the other committees (CULT = Culture, ITRE = Industry) were
          rejected. Study reports commissioned by the Parliament and
          other EU institutions were disregarded or misquoted, as some of
          their authors point out (see below). A few socialists and
          conservatives voted together with Greens and Left in favor of
          real limits on patentability (such as the CULT opinion, based
          on traditional definitions, that "data processing is not a
          field of technology" and that technical invention is about "use
          of controllable forces of nature"), but they were overruled by
          the two largest blocks. Most MEPs simply followed the voting
          lists of their "patent experts", such as Arlene McCarthy (UK)
          for the Socialists (PSE) and shadow rapporteur Dr. Joachim
          Würmeling (DE) for the Conservatives (EPP). Both McCarthy and
          Würmeling have closely followed the advice of the directive
          proponents from the European Patent Office (EPO) and the
          European Commission's Industrial Property Unit (CEC-Indprop,
          represented by former UK Patent Office employee Anthony Howard)
          and declined all offers of dialog with software professionals
          and academia ever since they were nominated rapporteurs in May
          2002.

   -> [15]FFII: Software Patents in Europe
          For the last few years the European Patent Office (EPO) has,
          contrary to the letter and spirit of the existing law, granted
          more than 30000 patents on what the law calls "programs for
          computers" and what the European Patent Office (EPO) started to
          call "computer-implemented inventions" in May 2000: software in
          a context of patent claims, i.e. rules of organisation and
          calculation framed in terms of generic computing equipment. Now
          Europe's patent community is pressing to impose the EPO's
          recent practise by writing a new law. Europe's programmers and
          citizens are facing considerable risks. Here you find the basic
          documentation, starting from a short overview and the latest
          news.

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References

  12. http://www.symlabs.com/
  13. http://www.ansol.org/
  14. http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/juri0617/index.en.html
  15. http://swpat.ffii.org/index.en.html