EUROPEAN COUNCIL WON'T VOTE ON SOFTWARE PATENTS PROPOSAL NOW
Apparently influenced by a Nov. 7 letter from the CEOs of Alcatel, Ericsson, Nokia, Philips and Siemens expressing grave concerns about the proposal, European officials late last week decided against sending draft European Commission (EC) legislation on patenting computer-implemented inventions to Competitiveness Council Ministers. The proposal sparked strong criticism from those who said it would permit American-style business method patents (BMPs) by allowing the patenting of pure software.
Sign up for a free preview to unlock the rest of this article
Communications Daily is required reading for senior executives at top telecom corporations, law firms, lobbying organizations, associations and government agencies (including the FCC). Join them today!
While the telecom CEOs said they supported the original goals of the directive -- to harmonize European law, “stop the drift toward the U.S. approach of patenting pure business methods and nontechnical software,” safeguard interoperability and protect the status quo under which open source software models flourish alongside patents -- they said “the vote… has completely turned the Commission’s original proposal around, removing effective patent protection for much -- and in the case of telecommunications and consumer electronics, probably most -- of our R&D investment.”
The companies asked the EC and council to take affirmative measures to redress the situation by sending “a strong countersignal” that the law in Europe won’t be changed “suddenly and dramatically” and that international obligations such as those under the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Agreement wouldn’t be breached. If the status quo can’t be codified, the CEOs said, “it would be better to have no directive at all than a directive which does untold damage to European industry.”
In Sept., the European Parliament (EP) overwhelmingly approved a version of the bill that included 64 amendments. However, because of the number of amendments tacked on by the EP, officials decided not to transmit the draft to the Competitiveness Council, but to send it back to the working group for more work. The Council will make a decision “sometime next year,” a diplomatic source said. An industry source said the amendments adopted by the EP were “quite extreme” and would have changed the proposal drastically.
It’s a “disaster” for European Information & Communications Technology Industry Assn. (EICTA) companies that, for example, need patents to offer up for cross- licensing deals with U.S. businesses, said Leo Baumann, EICTA mgr.-EP affairs & communications for the organization. “We're quite happy with current practice” and prefer the status quo, he said.
The American Chamber of Commerce to the EU said it, too, worried that the EP amendments could hurt industry. “We're hoping for a common position under the Irish Presidency that will take the interests of industry on board,” the group said.
The Council’s delay was understandable given that several amendments were needed to be clarified, said Ville Oksanen, vice chmn. of Electronic Frontier Finland. Oksanen said he hoped member states now would deal with the issue at the “political level so that the civil servants won’t make the decision by themselves without hearing the civil society.” The question, he said, is primarily about finding the proper balance between “certain players which would benefit (mostly big companies) and lose (small and medium- sized enterprises, open source developers) -- and thus it clearly belongs to the political realm.”