Lehne Speech in the Plenary
Lehne first praises Kauppi for adopting the party line which he forced on her, then procedes to claiming that this directive is not about software and the Council's position is to prevent patents on pure software, and that small and medium companies in the software field are happy with the Council's position.
Klaus-Heiner Lehne (EPP-DE, Germany)
Transcript of english translation, see also transcription or orignal speech and listen to the Source stream:
Thank you president, ladies and gentlemen.
Ofcourse we give thanks to rapporteur and shadow raporteur, but here in partucular I would like to thank the shadow rapporteur for our group, Piia-Noora Kaupii who has done a great job here, and found some excellent compromises to come up with the right solutions and shown tremendous know-how here. I have as much admiration as is possible for the job that she has done on this.
One thing I want to make perfectly clear, and it was clear in the legal affairs commmitee there too. Nobody, no political group, no individual, wants software patents , well - some individuals might, but that's not really what this is all about.
The point behind the directive was to prevent the development that has taken place in the US and is taking place in Europe too. That is the goal. And the common position meets that goal as well. We have heard the chamber of commerce and industry in Munich and Upper Bayern and they said to us that (that is btw, the part of Germany where they have the biggest concentration of small business developing software), and they feel that too, that the common position will solve their problems and meet their requirements, but they can be improved none the less, and in the legel affairs commitee we came up with a whole series of decisive improvements in the form of 39 amendments, clarifications , new options being created, interoperabitily, technical definitions and so on. Those are examples. It's a moderate report which is a good attempt to solving the problems we have.
The Rocard amendments and those from other groups however have gone way beyond this goal. They even refer to the Lisbon process. There is nothing in the Lisbon process about the knowledge based economy in Europe. All our knowledge depends on the skill of our people. So what is going to happen if we have all these extreme amendments that go far too far, if we go along with those, future generation in this continent will loose the chance of livelyhood, and I think that is why the vast majority of our group do not agree with those amendments.
The next important point is the refusal amendments, the refusal amendments so called, to refuse the common position and send it back to commission. There are two reasons to take this into consideration. First of all, we are going to have to go through a long conservation process on the basis on amendments in the legal affairs commitee and then we could loose out at the end of the third reading by a simple majority. Secondly we don't want to cause harm to Europe in general and the Lisbon process in particular by means of these amendments. That is the decision we have to make today.
