EuroParl Report: Commission & Council codifying EPO's US patent practice

[Jonas Maebe <jonas.maebe@ugent.be>]

PRESS RELEASE FFII -- [ Europe / economy / ICT ]

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EuroParl Report: Commission & Council codifying EPO's US patent practice
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Brussels, 16 February 2005 -- "If we adopt the current proposal, it will
create the same broad and ambiguous system that is in place in America",
thus concludes a report prepared for the European Parliament's
Directorate General for Economic and Scientific Policy for involved
Members of the European Parliament. Politicians are also invited to
think about a faster and cheaper system which avoids the mistakes the US
made.

Amidst the turmoil surrounding the Council debacles, an extensive report
written for the EP's DG for Economic and Social Policy shows how the
Commission and Council proposals would simply enshrine the practice of
the European Patent Office. The author compares this practice to US case
law, and concludes that "most business methods granted in America would
also be patentable at [the] EPO, because they are seen as a process."

Additionally, the report also debunks the often heard argument that the
only reason that SMEs are opposed to software patents is the fact that
they are simply not well informed about how such patents would benefit
them. By looking at the large number of patents which can be applicable
to a single software product and the fact that big companies are "using
their broad patents and demand a licensing fee from SMEs, in combination
with a threat to sue them if they do not pay, or [to] buy up the small
companies", it becomes clear that the SMEs' concerns are quite
legitimate.

Arguing that Europe should learn from the US' mistakes instead of
blindly repeating them, the author notes that Europe should work on a
faster and cheaper patent system with more narrow protection scopes. The
FFII agrees that a system with such properties -- fast, cheap, narrow --
is much more suited for the protection of investments in software, given
the high rate of innovation and low entry barrier. This also explains
the success of the use of copyright in this area, given that it's free,
instantaneous and quite narrow.

FFII's president Hartmut Pilch comments:

  The Parliament's report has identified the problems and specifies what
  the deliverables of "intellectual property" in the 21st century should
  be: "fast, cheap, narrow". The FFII has been developing proposals for
  a future system of intellectual property that fulfills the
  specifications: an alternative in which the rest of the world could
  indeed follow Europe, which lowers the entry barrier, diminishes
  transaction costs, does not suffer from the inherent broadness of the
  patent system, nor from the endless examination delays.

  Currently being developed under the working title "Industrial
  Copyright", to stress its goal of being fast-cheap-narrow, the work in
  progress can be monitored online at http://wiki.ffii.org/IndpropEn. We
  hope that our next conference, to be held in Brussels later this year,
  will focus on this subject, and we are happy to see that the same
  thoughts are appearing independently in the research departments of
  the European Parliament.

  If the much-cited "Lisbon Strategy" is to become a serious strategy in
  the area of the knowledge economy, then this is the kind of subject
  that must be put on the agenda.


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Extra information
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- Full report
  http://www.ffii.org/~jmaebe/epecosci0502/SoftwarePatent.pdf

- Summary presentation of the report
  http://www.ffii.org/~jmaebe/epecosci0502/SoftwareHandout.pdf

- "Industrial Copyright"
  http://wiki.ffii.org/IndpropEn

- Permanent link to this press release
  http://wiki.ffii.org/EPDGEcoSci050216En

- Demo and Press conference on the 17th February in Brussels
  http://wiki.ffii.org/DemoBrussels050217En


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Contact
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Hartmut Pilch, Munich Office
phm@ffii.org
tel. +49 (0)89 18979927

Erik Josefsson, Brussels Office
erjos@ffii.org
tel. +32 (0)485 83 21 26

Jonas Maebe, Board Member
jmaebe@ffii.org
tel. +32 (0)485 36 96 45

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About the FFII -- http://www.ffii.org
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The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) is a
non-profit association registered in several European countries, 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 500 members, 1,200 companies
and 80,000 supporters have entrusted the FFII to act as their voice in
public policy questions concerning exclusion rights (intellectual
property) in data processing.