Fwd: Mandrakelinux NWL: Software patents - fresh news and call for action

[Gregor.Pirnaver at email.si]

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Subject: Mandrakelinux NWL: Software patents - fresh news 
and call for action
Date: ponedeljek 17. maja 2004 19:07
From: Mandrakesoft Team <return at mandrakesoft.com>
To: Gregor.Pirnaver at MandrakePriNas.org

Flash: Software patents - fresh news and call for action

As a follow-up to our latest flash regarding the upcoming
 decision of the European Council to legalize software
 patentability in Europe, here are some fresh news and
 information on what you can do to help.

If nothing changes, tomorrow, Tuesday May 18, the European
 Council, that is, the European body which represents all
 the governments of the European Union, will vote in favor
 of a directive that will legalize software patents in
 Europe. Last September, faced with a similar choice, the
 European Parliament voted major amendments to the
 directive text drafted by the European Commission,
 actually rejecting software patentability. However, the
 Council, ignoring all of these amendments, is going to
 vote in favor of a text that is even worse than the
 initial version of the Commission.

Why can the Council take a decision which will be so
 harmful to the European software industry? Unlike the
 Parliament, which is a place open to the public, where
 Members of the European Parliament have had time to study
 the proposal and hear many positions on the issue in order
 to take a well-thought decision, the Council is a closed
 body where, due to the alledged complexity of the subject,
 representatives of the governments have handed out the
 file to committees of experts.

These experts, who re-drafted the text and wrote position
 papers on why to vote it, are in fact mostly
 representatives from the national patent offices, backed
 by the heads of the legal departments of some big
 industrial companies, all of whom have a common interest:
 more patents mean more power for them, irrespective of the
 harm that will be done to the economy at large, and even
 to their own companies. In the name of "the Industry" and
 of "innovation", they manipulated the political
 decision-makers to make them believe that the new text did
 not allow to patent pure software, that it was a good
 compromise between the Commission and Parliament texts,
 and that not all of the parliamentary amendments could be
 kept because some of them were illegal with respect to
 international treaties such as TRIPS. All of this is plain
 lie.

In fact, if voted, the text of the Council would lead to a
 situation where big companies with large patent portfolios
 use these to lock their respective markets and prevent
 competition from innovative SMEs, and where "intellectual
 property" companies that do not create any software use
 their own patent portfolios to collect license fee rents
 from everybody. This is the situation which is happening
 in the US, putting at risk its successful software
 industry. This is what may just happen in Europe in a few
 months.

However, it is not too late. Because of growing pressure
 from computer professionals and from the public, and
 because they get more and more feed-back from the media,
 political decision-makers begin to get aware of the
 issues, and to have doubts about the sincerity of the
 patent lobby. In some countries, they have taken the file
 back from the patent offices
http://lwn.net/Articles/85379/
http://kwiki.ffii.org/?SwpatcninoEn
and some countries of the Council have just decided to
 switch from a voting procedure without debate to a voting
 procedure with debate, as the text gets less and less
 consensus among the members of the European Union.

You can convince even more of them to reject software
 patentability. In order to do that, please take some time
 to read about the issues at stake, and spread the
 information across your friends and business contacts, the
 press, your members of the parliament and your government.
 It is essential that elected policy makers get back into
 command of the situation and do not leave the patent
 offices decide alone.

Here are some texts which can help you to present the
 issues to the media and to convince policy-makers of all
 countries of the European Union.

A very readable analysis by François Pellegrini explaining
the legal and economic issues of software patentability:
http://www.abul.org/article191.html

A thorough analysis by Jonas Maebe of the difference
 between the three versions of the directive, and why
 software patents are indeed illegal with respect to TRIPS:
http://www.elis.ugent.be/~jmaebe/swpat/councilanalysis/pape
r-en.pdf

Positions of the member countries of the European Union:
http://swpat.ffii.org/akteure/  (add "pt", "ie", "fr",
"de", "be", "gr", etc to have the positions of the
member countries)

The page of the FFII giving some directions for actions:
http://kwiki.ffii.org/?LtrSmePolit0405En

A recent paper published in the Washington Post describing
 the current situation in the United States:
"Patenting Air or Protecting Property? Information Age
 Invents a New Problem"
 http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A54548-2003Dec10?
language=printer

31 companies sued for using the JPEG image format (the
 plaintiff filed for a patent while recommending the
 adoption in international bodies of a standard including
 its patented technology):
 http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,63200,00.html%3F
tw%3Dwn_bizhead_1

A US company sues companies of on-line content
 distribution: http://www.e-data.com/
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5205529.html
http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1104_2-5144097.html

A well-documented file on the reference site Law.com:
http://www.law.com/jsp/statearchive.jsp?type=Article&oldid=
ZZZV4RVSSPC

Thank you very much for your help.

	Mandrakesoft Online Team.

-- 
Uporabnik Mandrake Linuxa
http://MandrakePriNas.org/