2004-04-30 Patent lobby letter to the Council in name of Media Giants (Bertelsmann, Yahoo, Reuters, ...)
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http://www.icrt.org/pos_papers/2004/040430_IPR.pdf
The letter of a well-known pro-patent group dominated by large telecommunication companies spreads misinformation about the European Parliament's amendments to the software patent directive and asks the Council to remove all the limits that the Parliament imposed.
This letter presents the often-used Trips lie as well as other patent movement propaganda whose untruth everybody knows, and puts under it the impressive names of some big companies.
Among the companies that supported this letter are major media and publishing companies such as Bertelsmann, Reuters, Reed Elsevier, Walt Disney, Yahoo, Time Warner etc.
The most likely explanation for this phenomenon is that ICRT has its own patent workgroup in which the patent arms of the interested companies assemble and draft statements that the group signs without discussing much about them.
- I am writing this letter on behalf of the ICRT member companies to draw your attention to the fact that what European businesses need is legal certainty. As expressed in Recital 7b, the aim of this Directive is to prevent different interpretations of the provisions of the European Patent Convention (EPC) concerning the limits to patentability. The consequent legal certainty should help to foster a climate conducive to investment and innovation in the field of software. As acknowledged in Recital 6, the Community and its Member States are bound by the Agreement on trade-related aspects of intellectual property rights (TRIPS). Article 27(1) of TRIPS provides that patents shall be available for any inventions, whether products or processes, in all fields of technology, provided that they are new, involve an inventive step and are capable of industrial application. Moreover, according to TRIPS, patent rights should be available and patent rights enjoyable without discrimination as to the field of technology. These principles should accordingly apply to computer-implemented inventions. As we have submitted earlier, the European Parliament?s version of the Directive, if adopted, would lead to a business climate that discourages investment in and development of technology. The current legal regime, although imperfect, is unquestionably superior to that which would be introduced by the European Parliament?s version of the Directive. We urge the Council not to agree on a bad compromise, but only to consider the interest of having a dynamic European market and research-based companies in all fields of industry where the development of software ensures innovation and new growth. We are confident that the Council will show the right way and will take into consideration the long-term concerns of competitiveness and employment in Europe. We therefore urge you to reject proposals of the kind expressed in footnotes 12 and 15 of your April 22 draft and to consider improving article 5 paragraph 2 in a way that would truly reflect existing EPO practice. Adopting a bad compromise that deviates from TRIPS and that deviates from the EPC as consistently interpreted by the European Patent Office's Boards of Appeal will turn out to be far worse than keeping the current legal regime, without a directive on computer-implemented inventions. Yours sincerely, John Stephens Chairman Member Companies Amazon.com American Express Bertelsmann British Telecom Coface eBay EDS - Electronic Data Systems IBM Lagardère Microsoft NCR Corporation News Corporation Limited Reed Elsevier Reuters Royal Philips Electronics SAS Siemens Sony Entertainment Telenor The Walt Disney Company Time Warner UPC Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck Wolters Kluwer NV Yahoo!
