EU Software Patent Plans Shelved Amid Massive Demonstrations

[Hartmut Pilch <phm@a2e.de>]

   EU Software Patent Directive plans shelved amid massive demonstrations

                             Brussels 2003/09/01

                            For Immediate Release

   On Aug 28th, the European Parliament postponed its vote on the proposed
   EU Software Patent Directive. The day before, approximately 500 persons
   had gathered for a rally beside the Parliament in Brussels, accompanied
   by an online demonstration involving more than 2000 websites. The events
   in and near the Parliament were extensively in many news channels,
   including tv and radio, across Europe and the world. Within a few days,
   the petition calling the European Parliament to reject software
   patentability accumulated 50,000 new signatures.

Details

   Last Wednesday, August 27th, several organisations called for a
   demonstration in Brussels and for an on-line demonstration against the
   proposed EU "software patent directive" COM(2002)92, euphemistically
   titled "on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions".

   Citizens demonstrated in front of the European Parliament, wearing black
   t-shirts and launching black balloons "to symbolise their sorrow for the
   innovation that the EU would lose if it approved a monopoly regime on
   computer based solutions as the Commission and the JURI report propose",
   as one of the organisers explained. Surrounded by banners and patent
   tombstones, several speeches were held and a pantomime play was performed
   which showed the EU bureaucracy helping wealthy corporations to strangle
   small innovative software enterprises.

   In spite of the short notice (it was only announced one week in advance),
   the online demonstration, calling to substitute homepages by a protest
   page for all of Wednesday, was followed by over 2800 websites. Among
   those were important websites such as those of the biggest Spanish labour
   union Comisiones Obreras, the Andalusian CGT union, the French SPECIS;
   large associations of computer professionals such as ATI.es, AI2 and
   Prosa.dk; user associations like SSLUG, Hispalinux, Asociación de
   Internautas, AFUL and GUUG; software projects like Apache (developers of
   the most used web server in the world, with over 25 million
   installations), PHP (a very popular programing language), the two main
   free desktop projects (KDE and GNOME); operating system distributions
   LinEx, Slackware, Debian, Knoppix and Mandrake; civil rights
   associations, distributed development platform Savannah (hosting over
   1500 projects), companies, weblogs, personal websites...

   The strike coincided with initiatives by new players, including national
   associations of SMEs, national labor unions, the internet sections of the
   French Parti Socialiste and German Social Democratic Party, and a
   [16]group of economists, all of whom sent letters to members of the
   European Parliament, warning them of faulty reasoning in the JURI report
   and catastrophic consequences for the European economy.

   The Parliament was already [17]divided in June, when it [18]postponed
   the decision to September. The massive protest among computer
   professionals, software companies and computer users, and its echo in
   the press on the Internet, radio and television, appear to have
   further eroded the directive's support in the European Parliament and
   encouraged various party groups to come out with new amendment
   proposals. The presidents of the transnational groups decided in a
   meeting on thursday afternoon to postpone the debate again from the
   planned European Parliament plenary session of Monday September 1st.
   The debate and vote may now take place in the next session (September
   22-25) or at a later date, subject to decision next week. The
   directive has been controversial since its publication on 2002-02-20,
   and decisions have been delayed already seven times from the initially
   scheduled vote of 2002-12-16.

   During a conference in the European Parliament on Wednesday 14.00-16.00,
   Reinier Bakels, a dutch law scholar who had written a study on the
   directive at the order of the European Parliament, criticised:

     This directive proposal brings no clarity and no harmonisation. It is
     unclear and contradictory both on its aims and on the means of
     achieving these aims. The European Parliament can not be expected to
     repair such a fundamentally broken directive proposal. The best thing
     the Parliament can do is to send this proposal back to the Commission
     and demand that an interdisciplinary group of experts should work out a
     new proposal.

   Hartmut Pilch, president of FFII and speaker of the Eurolinux
   Alliance, agreed to this, but added:

     We hope that MEPs can, during the coming 3 weeks, understand that
     almost every single article and every single recital of this directive
     needs major amendments, if a clear limitation of patentability is to be
     achieved. We have proposed a set of amendments[26] which could do the
     job and has received backing by a large part ot the interested
     communities[27]. Many of these amendments have already been or are
     being tabled by MEPs from various political groups. By voting for these
     amendments, MEPs can prompt the Commission and the Council to come up
     with a new proposal, this time based on a serious assessment of the
     interests of all parties and a verifiable solution to the problems,
     without any more doublespeak or ambiguous terminology.

Annotated Links

   -> [19]Draft Press Release 200000
          Report about the successes of the Demo in BXL, focussing on the
          rise in number of petition signatures.

   -> [20]CORDIS 2003-08-28: Draft legislation on patenting computerised
          inventions will stifle innovation, claim protestors
          An official EU news agency reports about the demo, with an
          interview of Peter Gerwinski from FFII

          see also [21]CORDIS: MEPs vote to tighten up rules on
          patentability of computerised inventions

Media Contacts

   mail:
          media at ffii org

   phone:
          Hartmut Pilch +49-89-18979927

          More Contacts to be supplied upon request

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.

About the FFII -- www.ffii.org

   The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) is a
   non-profit association registered in Munich, which is dedicated to the
   spread of data processing literacy. FFII supports the development of
   public information goods based on copyright, free competition, open
   standards. More than 250 members, 300 companies and 15,000 supporters
   have entrusted the FFII to act as their voice in public policy
   questions in the area of exclusivity rights (intellectual property) in
   the field of software.

Permanent URL of this Press Release

   http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/demo0827/index.en.html

Annotated Links

   -> [22]2003/08/25-9 BXL: Software Patent Directive Amendments
          Members of the European Parliament are coming back to work on
          monday August 25th. It is the last week before the vote on the
          Software Patent Directive Proposal. We are organising a
          conference and street rally wednesday the 27th. Some of our
          friends will moreover be staying in the parliament for several
          days. Time to work decide on submission of amendments to the
          software patent directive proposal is running out. FFII has
          proposed one set of amendments that stick as closely as
          possible to the original proposal while debugging and somewhat
          simplifying it. An alternative small set of amendments would
          "cut the crap" and rewrite the directive from scratch. We
          present and explain the possible approaches.

   -> [23]Online Demonstration Against Software Patents
          We can show our concern by physical presence as well as by more
          or less gently blocking access to webpages in a concerted
          manner at certain times.

   -> [24]Vote in 8 days: 2000 IT bosses urge European Parliament to say
          NO to software patents
          A "Petition for a Free Europe without Software Patents" has
          gained more than 150000 signatures. Among the supporters are
          more than 2000 company owners and chief executives and 25000
          developpers and engineers from all sectors of the European
          information and telecommunication industries, as well as more
          than 2000 scientists and 180 lawyers. Companies like Siemens,
          IBM, Alcatel and Nokia lead the list of those whose researchers
          and developpers want to protect programming freedom and
          copyright property against what they see as a "patent
          landgrab". Currently the patent policy of many of these
          companies is still dominated by their patent departments. These
          have intensively lobbied the European Parliament to support a
          proposal to allow patentability of "computer-implemented
          inventions" (recent patent newspeak term which usually refers
          to software in the context of patent claims, i.e. algorithms
          and business methods framed in terms of generic computing
          equipment), which the rapporteur, UK Labour MEP Arlene
          McCarthy, backed by "patent experts" from the socialist and
          conservative blocks, is trying to rush through the European
          Parliament on June 30, just 13 days after she had won the vote
          in the Legal Affairs Committe (JURI).

   -> [25]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 computer-implemented rules of
          organisation and calculation (programs for computers). Now
          Europe's patent movement is pressing to consolidate this
          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.

References

  16. http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/ekon0820/index.en.html
  17. http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/plen0620/index.en.html
  18. http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/plen0626/index.en.html
  19. http://wiki.ael.be/index.php/PressRelease200000
  20. 
http://dbs.cordis.lu/cgi-bin/srchidadb?CALLER=NHP_EN_NEWS&ACTION=D&SESSION=&RCN=EN_RCN_ID:20801&TBL=EN_NEWS
  21. 
http://dbs.cordis.lu/cgi-bin/srchidadb?CALLER=NHP_EN_NEWS&ACTION=D&SESSION=&RCN=EN_RCN_ID:20436
  22. http://swpat.ffii.org/events/2003/europarl/08/index.en.html
  23. http://swpat.ffii.org/group/demo/index.en.html
  24. http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/epet0622/index.en.html
  25. http://swpat.ffii.org/index.en.html
  26. http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/eubsa-swpat0202/prop/index.en.html
  27. http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/eubsa-swpat0202/demands/index.en.html