Maciej Suchomski on Security and Copyrights

Patents vs. copyrights and intellectual property...

The story ...

The official EC story is available here (includes no comments on EP or other sources).
The official decision-making process (schedule) by the EC is here.

Some time ago:  the EC said about inconsitencies in patentability across Europe (Oct. 19th, 2000) and proposed a draft directive (Feb. 20th, 2002)
The "war" is comming:  the EP positively voted (first reading with amendments) on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions (Sep. 24th, 2003)
Bad things happen:  the Competitiveness Council reached a political agreement on Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions -- Spain was the only against it [Poland was also, but it didn't reiterate in second voting] (May 18th, 2004)
First battle won: the Polish government (new in EU -- since May 1st, 2004) requested more time for getting to know with the software patent directive and the EU Agricultural (!?) Council withdrawn the A-Item from the agenda (Dec. 21st, 2004) [as mentioned above the picture]
Unsuccessful but good "restart" attack: the EP requested to restart the work on the patent directive (Feb. 3rd, 2005)
Delaying next battle: the EU Competitiveness Council postponed ratifying the directive from February 17th to March 7th, 2005 on (Feb. 11th, 2005)
Next battle lost: the EU Council didn't respect the rejection requests from Denmark, Poland and Portugal (even the attempt to change it from A-Item to B-Item didn't help) and undemocratically approved the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive (Mar. 7th, 2005)
EC as a terrorist - "this or nothing": the commissioner of the EC said that no new proposal will appear if this directive is rejected by the EP (Mar. 8th, 2005)
Final battle won: the European Parliament rejected (in second reading btw. first time in the history of EP) the proposed Computer-Implemented Inventions Directive (referred to as software patent directive) (Jul. 6th, 2005)
Know how to loose: the commissioner of the EC during the MEPs debate has said that "if Parliament invites us to do so [present a new proposal], we will speak with the various parliamentary committees and then consider the next procedures" (Jul. 6th, 2005)
Is it really game over?: the EC stated that EPO will continue granting software patents, which has no legal backgrounds (Jul. 20th, 2005)
Backdoor attack: "Commission will review the state of progress in the whole area of IPR with a focus on competitiveness issues and come up with suggestions on how to improve the situation in 2006" -- attack as a side effect of enforcing a Community patent as national patent without having software patents problem solved (*) (Oct. 5th, 2005)
BTW.: who would like to pay almost 30'000 € to European Patent Office for a patent ("big blues" sure but not SMEs especially those from new EU member countries; interesting contrast of costs: 10'300 in US and 16'450 in Japan)

*) Ch.2 Sec. 2 Art. 8 do not mention anything about special treatment of computer software, so one should assume an algorithm being a process and a computer program being a product using the process, and all software patents granted will be legal & valid

Some thoughts...

"The only winners in the patent war are the firms that use them against other companies and the lawyers they employ." from "Software Patents Gone Bad" by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols (Dec.5th,2004) on eweek.com.

"Software patents are dangerous to the economy at large, and particularly to the European economy." in "Appeal to the EU Council" by L.Torvalds, M.Widenius, R.Lerdorf (Nov.23.,2004) on nosoftwarepatents.com

"Oracle Corporation opposes the patentability of software. (...) Patent law provides to inventors an exclusive right to new technology in return for publication of the technology. This is not appropriate for industries such as software development in which innovations occur rapidly, can be made without a substantial capital investment, and tend to be creative combinations of previously-known techniques." Oracle Corporation Patent Policy

So, since I'm an IT guy, I started to wonder if the future of the IT branch is 90% of lawyers, 9% of marketing and one pure IT developer that will earn for all these guys... It's ridiculous! Try to imagine that and just take a look at the patented e-shop (thanks to FFII).

"Many companies (...) oppose software patents on the grounds that they stifle innovation and shut out smaller competitors, requiring companies to build up huge patent portfolios in order to defend themselves from legal attacks."

And this is obviously not the goal of small- and mid-size IT companies with brilliant ideas... They would like to develop and not to destroy (or worse to be destroyed by giants having patents of "every button").

"Software patents would be an advantage to large companies with patent stockpiles while making it difficult for open-source projects and smaller companies to compete, industry observers say." Matthew Broersma, ZDNet UK (Mar. 9th 2005)