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2005-05-15: The European Liberals are claiming that Small and Medium Enterprises (SME//s) need software patents and are using the EU's Directive amending process for spreading that claim, by means of empty amendments which, contrary to liberal traditions, only increase the state quota in the economy by asking for creation of new bureaucracy with ill defined missions. Dutch MEP Toine Manders from the Bolkestein party and colleagues from the ALDE (Liberals in the European Parliament) group have submitted numerous proposals to the Legal Affairs Committee to ask the Commission for reporting about how SME//s are the beneficiaries of software patents. FFII finds that the amendments do not contribute to any of the difficult discussions between the Parliament and the Council but rather just inflate the number of amendments and clog the discussion. Moreover, the real purpose seems to be in the "justification" part, which jumps to false conclusions about the questions which supposedly need to be investigated, thereby slapping SME//s all over Europe in the face and supporting false representation claims that have been made by big industry associations such as EICTA and UNICE.
Comments
Gérald Sédrati-Dinet, FFII's Vice-President
- There is a common bias in these amendments consisting to propose a Committee whose purpose is to monitor effects of directive on SMEs, and to already write down some unproven statements that indeed should be the conclusions of this monitoring : "SMEs represent the majority of applicants for CII patents", "Intellectual property rights benefit small and medium-sized enterprises just as they do larger entities", etc. This is just like a president who is proposing a referendum to citizens, meanwhile threating them with unproven consequences if they want to chose one of the proposed option in this referendum.
