Posts filed under 'News'
Brussels, 14 November 2006 — FFII President Pieter Hintjens today announced the European Patent Conference (EUPACO), a series of events under the banner “Towards a New European Patent System”.
In a statement Hintjens said “the patent system, both globally, and in Europe, is under serious stress. The unrestricted expansion of patentability into non-traditional areas together with the rising flood of poorly granted ’soft’ patents in biotech, pharma, and software have throttled innovation. In Europe the European Patent Office earns over Euro 1bn a year but still cannot conduct proper examinations. All solutions seem to be promoting worse patents, and worse patent practice. Something must change.”
“The EPO and Commission have spent much of 2006 building up a campaign to promote a new non-EU patent court, under the so-called EPLA plan. This is being sold as an ‘interim’ solution on the way to a real community patent, but the Commission has failed to provide a roadmap for such an evolution, and the FFII believes EPLA would be a long-term consolidation of today’s broken system.”
“With so much power concentrated in one place, and without proper democratic oversight, patent practice will get much worse,” explains Hintjens. “There are important and urgent fixes to be made in the patent system, but the Commission and EPO are blithely ignoring these issues. So, we have launched the European Patent Conference, a gathering of the wisest economists, lawyers, and industry experts. We will look at the patent system, we will build proposals for change, and we will work to get those changes implemented.”
The first EUPACO event will be held in Munich on November 25th, 2006. The second event will be in Brussels on January 24th, 2007. Both events are free to all. A larger, international event is planned for May 2007.
The FFII is calling for speakers and participants from all sectors and disciplines. Hintjens points out that “problems in the patent system affect all industries and all consumers. The European Patent Conference is the ideal opportunity for those who want to fix these problems.”
For more information, see http://www.eupaco.org.
November 17th, 2006
The Court of Appeal’s Judgement in Macrossan and Aerotel is now up at:
http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2006/1371.html
The Court of Appeal upheld the rejection of Macrossan but overturned the rejection of Aerotel in the High Court.
Rufus Pollock of FFII-UK said: “We’re obviously delighted that the Court of Appeal upheld the rejection of Macrossan. To have failed to do so would have opened the floodgates for the patenting of business methods as well as overturning much of the recent case-law in the area. The implications of the Aerotel decision are less clear and we are still evaluating the Court’s reasoning. It is certainly a great pity that Aerotel settled with Telco before the hearing so nobody from Telco challenged this representation in court with the result that it was left to the Patent Office to discuss the patent.
One noteworthy aspect of the judgement is the lengthy ‘appendix’ to the decision in which the Court discusses recent EPO jurisprudence. The conclusion to be drawn from the summary is stark: current EPO practice is utterly confused and some recent decisions have reduced the Article 52 exclusion of software programs from patentability to such airy thinness as to render it utterly ineffective.”
For background information see our previous press release:
http://www.ffii.org.uk/archives/32
October 27th, 2006
Harmut Pilch has a full summary of the EPLA situation but here are the key excerpts:
Background
The draft European Patent Litigation agreement of 2004 has accumulated strong momentum thanks to support from the European Patent Office (EPO), the patent departments of large companies (= “industry”), the patent officials of the national ministries (= “the member states”) and by the European Commission’s Directorate General of the Internal Market under Commissioner Charlie McCreevy. EPO president Alain Pompidou says the text of the agreement is ready for rubberstamping by the national parliaments. Some national parliaments, such as Germany’s lower chamber (Bundesrat), have already done so. Input from the European Parliament is required only to a very limited extent.
Yet the spearheads of the patent establishment in the European Parliament, MEP Klaus-Heiner Lehne (EPP, DE) and Sharon Bowles of (ALDE, UK), both legal professionals involved in the patent litigation business, have tried hard to push their groups, which together form a majority, into supporting a motion which gives uncritical backing to the EPLA and to the plans of Commissioner Charlie McCreevy.
The socialist, green, left and and eurosceptic parties have filed motions which strongly criticise the EPLA, thereby triggering nervous reactions from Lehne, including a press release in which he calls his adversaries “diehard anti-innovation MEPs”. During the Strasburg session week of late September, the Lehne-Bowles proposal was cut down from 17 to 3 articles which again came under pressure from within their group. Helpful amendment proposals received support among many MEPs in these groups.
Immediate Situation
However, an unexpected turn came on the 3rd of October, when the socialist group, in view of the possibility that Lehne might still achieve a majority for a bad resolution, gave up its strong position and entered a compromise that prevents the worst. According to this compromise resolution, the parliament basically supports the EPLA and asks for the EU to “join the EPC”, but calls for “significant improvements” to the current EPLA text. Meanwhile, efforts are going on to improve this position by tabling amendments, which would turn the current weak green light into a weak red light.
As things stand now, on thursday, October 12, the European Parliament will vote on three different proposals for a resolution on this subject (at a mini-plenary in Brussels), of which the EPP-ALDE-PSE proposal is set to win with a high margin. The deadline for filing new motions is over. However, amendments to existing motions can be filed until Monday, October 9 (the week of the vote) by either party groups or trans-partisan groups of at least 37 MEPs, and some very helpful amendments indeed have chances of being filed next monday and of receiving majority support next thursday.
What you can do
For the last few weeks, the FFII has maintained a continuous relatively strong presence in the European Parliament. There were always at least 2, sometimes more, activists working in the Parliament to support EPLA-critical efforts. You can contact the team by writing to europarl-help [at] ffii [dot] org.
If you can afford to spend a few hours of your time, please find out at http://www.europarl.europa.eu who your MEP is and send her a polite and concise mail where you inquire about the current situation and ask whether she would be willing to meet you or someone from the FFII team to explore the possibility of supporting the current trans-partisan amendment effort. There is a sample fax about the EPLA motion which you can use if you wish.
If you’re from the UK and are going to contact (have contacted) your MEP please notify uk-help mailing list so that we make sure we don’t badger the same overworked MEP twice.
Main Talking Points
- The EPLA would raise the costs of most patent lawsuits over the status quo, which disadvantages SMEs. For a small to medium-scale litigation, the overall costs will amount to EUR 97,000 to EUR 415,000 according to EPO estimates (and the EPO is pro-EPLA, so the actual numbers may well be much higher). Some SMEs who hold patents would not be able to afford to enforce them, and SMEs who are threatened with patent litigation wouldn’t be able to defend themselves. The current system of country-by-country litigation may not seem perfect, but it’s much more affordable to SMEs than the present proposal for the EPLA.
1a. The EPLA makes patent lawsuits prohibitively expensive for those who publish software on the internet. An Irish programmer could be sued in Cyprus, because the alleged infringement takes place everywhere where the Internet is, including Cyprus, and EPLA says that the lawsuit can be brought to a court at the location of infringment.
It’s a question of judicial independence: Lehne-Bowles propose to create a new court system that would be under the control of the same people who also govern the European Patent Office (ministry officials in charge of patent policy), while the alternative motion emphasizes the need to put the EPO under independent judicial control.
If judicial independence is compromised as proposed, software patents will become legally enforceable in Europe on a large scale. The way the EPO decides is known because of the EPO’s Boards of Appeals’ decisions; if you take more or less the same material and a very similar construction plan and build a machine, what comes out at the bottom of the machine is more or less the same. And the way the ministry officials in charge of the EPO (who would also be in charge of the EPLA court) like to define patent policy is known because they worked out the EU Council’s proposed software patent directive, which the EP then rejected. The EPLA is all about replicating the EPO structures.
The EPLA would strengthen the EPO system at the expense of the EU. The EU would probably become involved in some fashion, but it would be better for the EU to wait until the time is ripe for a true Community patent.
It’s about democracy itself. The EPO system is undemocratic and operates without parliamentary control. That’s why it should not be strengthened (or replicated) in its present form. Also, the draft EPLA would give ministry officials legislative authority on the rules of procedure, but in every country in the civilized world, the procedural code for the courts is defined by lawmakers (i.e., parliaments).
By supporting the Lehne-Bowles motion, the EP would support commissioner McCreevy’s new patent initiative almost unconditionally (and undeliberately), while the alternative motion voices constructive criticism and positions the Parliament for future debates on the right course of action.
Some major companies have even expressed various reservations concerning the proposed EPLA. Nokia, which holds more than 10,000 patents of its own, has said that the EPLA is too much in favor of certain patent holders and jeopardizes innovation.
October 5th, 2006
Brussels, London, Berlin, Warsaw, Ljubljana, 4th July 2006 — In an open
letter to the EU Commission, six small business associations have called
on Commissioners Verheugen and Reding to modify their plans for a task
force, designed “to define the future EU policy in ICT”.
The proposed task force mainly consists of large IT firms, such as IBM,
Cisco, and Intel, and the undersigning associations accuse the
Commission of ignoring the fact that 80 percent of the European IT
sector, by value, consists of small and medium-sized firms, who are
unrepresented in this task force but must bear the brunt of the policies
defined by the EU Commission.
Pieter Hintjens, President of FFII, an association which represents 3500
European IT companies, states: “The idea that we can create EU-wide
policy and legislation without input from a broad base has been
discredited. The EU must become more inclusive and less elitist if it is
to survive the challenges of public opinion in the decades ahead. We
are giving the Commission the opportunity to work with the majority now,
rather than face mass opposition later when it presents yet one more set
of special-interest proposals that damage the market.”
David Ramsden, Chairman of the Professional Contractors Group PCG, a cross-sector representative body that represents the interests of 12000 freelancers in the UK points out:
“Many of the EU’s most businesses in the ICT sector are also the smallest. The companies represented by PCG exemplify the significance of small firms to this area of the economy. It is vital that they are fully represented on any Task Force or other body relating to the sector.”
Other groups expressing their concern included the 600 German companies of PatentFrei.de representing 600 German companies, the Polish Software Market Association CEA-PME, an umbrella assocation of SMEs in Brussels; the Slovene Software Developers Assocation KODA.
Full press release and more details available here.
July 4th, 2006
Groklaw, the award-winning legal news and research website, has published an article by Cristian Miceli, a UK based IT lawyer, which takes a look at software patent issues in 2005 and addresses the question of whether software patents are beneficial or counterproductive.
As an attorney, Miceli says he believes in intellectual property rights, and “as part of this, I see the benefits that patents can potentially bring in certain sectors. However, as one law professor recently commented, ‘good policy does not just consist of “more rights”; it consists of maintaining a balance between the realm of property and the realm of the public domain’”.
Full Groklaw article here.
Cristian Miceli article here.
Ends
January 17th, 2006
The FFII General Assembly has unanimously elected a new president, Pieter Hintjens, to lead the organisation into 2006, backed by a strengthened board.
Following their summer success in defeating the directive on software patents, and the rapid growth of the FFII into 19 countries, the current president and board proposed Pieter Hintjens to lead the FFII into a new phase of growth and activity. The FFII General Assembly unanimously approved Pieter Hintjens’s nomination along with a strengthened board that includes FFII founder and former president Hartmut Pilch.
Pieter Hintjens is the 43-year old founder and MD of iMatix Corporation, a Belgian software firm. He has been active in the debate against software patents, explaining to the European Patent Office and the European Parliament why software and business process patents are so deadly for small innovative firms that are the life-blood of Europe’s innovation. He brings to the FFII his considerable experience both in the business domain and the technical
domain.
“The FFII is a force for the future”, said Pieter Hintjens, “and I am proud to be able to represent this organisation. The goal of my presidency will be to lay the foundations for managing our rapid growth, for turning ourselves into a highly professional global organisation, and for delivering results to the people and industries that depend on us”.
Hartmut Pilch, who has led the FFII since it was founded six years
ago, comments:
“This is a qualitative leap forward for FFII. I knew Pieter as a charismatic speaker on conferences which we organised in the European Parliament. When Pieter explained his vision to me and offered to spend a significant amount of time during the next year to make this vision happen, I immediately found the offer irresistible. Likewise, Pieter immediately captured the hearts of yesterday’s General Assembly. There is now a mood of confidence that we will be able to become strong enough to introduce needed legislation rather than just fight defensive battles. Needless to say, I will give Pieter all support I can.”
Press release in full.
November 30th, 2005
FREE AND OPEN-SOURCE SOFTWARE LUMINARIES CALL ON WORLDWIDE COMMUNITY TO VOTE AGAINST SOFTWARE PATENTS IN THE ‘EUROPEAN OF THE YEAR 2005′ INTERNET POLL
Richard Stallman, Tim O’Reilly, Alan Cox, Rasmus Lerdorf and Monty Widenius endorse Florian Mueller’s candidacy ‘because he runs on a NoSoftwarePatents ticket, and that is the message we want to reinforce’
On 22 September, Florian Mueller was nominated for the most prestigious award in EU politics, the ‘EV50 Europeans of the Year’, recognizing his political efforts against a legislative proposal that could have legalized software patents in Europe. The European Parliament rejected the bill on 6 July by a landslide of 648-32 votes. Mueller, who stressed that he owes this nomination “to our entire community and especially to the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII)”, is credited with founding a multilingual campaign website, speaking out in the media and at public events, and lobbying MEPs (Members of the European Parliament) as well as governments and parliaments in select EU member states.
The European Voice, a major EU-focused weekly, is now conducting an Internet poll in which Mueller runs against such famous contenders as U2 frontman Bono, Bob Geldof, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling, and political leaders including British prime minister Tony Blair, the outgoing German chancellor Gerhard Schroeder, and Schroeder’s successor designate Angela Merkel. The poll is open to the worldwide public until 11 November.
Press release in full.
Vote here!
October 10th, 2005
FFII and NoSoftwarePatents.com have won this years “Outstanding Contribution to Software Development” award at CNET’s premier technology industry event held at the Hilton Park Lane in London!
Here’s what they said:
“FFII and NoSoftwarePatents.com joined forces last year to campaign against the European software patent directive, which many feared would open the doors to an increasingly litigious marketplace in which small businesses would struggle to survive. In July this year, the European Parliament unexpectedly rejected the directive, a victory which can be attributed to the tireless work of this alliance.”
More details here
September 28th, 2005