2004-06-03 UK Conservatives for Fake Limits on Patentability, Against Europarl Amendments

--> UK Parties, Letters, Harbour

Voter J. Grant disappointed by favored candidate

I received this response from the candidate I am considering voting for. I am looking for a candidate in the "East midlands region", UK. I am looking for a candidate which fully supports "Europarl 2003-09-24: Amended Software Patent Directive" (24th Sept 2003). Or exactly the same updated to the present considered version.

The letter was as an awful Microsoft Word file, fortunately I managed to decode it!

Summary

Harbour's trick is to advocate fake limits of patentability. Of course life has become more difficult to hime since he is now forced to make false claims about "unworkability" of the European Parliament's real limits for which it voted in 2003/09/24.

A nice preview of the what the intellectual crookery lobby would be saying was given by Philippe Aigrain's speech in the Petition Committee: shortly after the vote.

Candidate forwards Malcolm Harbour's Lies about Commission Proposal and Parliament's Amendments

Dear Mr Grant

Thank you for your letter regarding the European Union Directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions (software patents). The European Commission published the draft Directive in February of last year as it become increasingly clear that European law on patenting software needed to be clarified. The aim of the Directive is to set out and defend the status quo in Europe following changes to the patent system in the USA and also planned for Japan. There is a clear intention across the EU Member States to see that Europe does not follow the USA and Japan in allowing widespread patent availability for software and business methods. Copyright will remain the principal method of protecting intellectual property in these cases. Conservative MEPs in the European Parliament supported the general line that the Commission took. This builds on and clarifies the existing patent law across the European Union and makes it clear that only software which forms part of a technological process will be patentable. This will allow patents to be provided for genuine technical inventions and stimulate European economic development in areas of economic strength like mobile telephony, digital television and computer controlled machine tools to name just a few possibilities. Such an approach would be compatible with national patent laws in the Member States and international treaties including TRIPS.

The Directive originally proposed by the Commission set a fair test for software (deciding whether it has a technical effect) before authorising a patent. Under their proposal, any technical invention in a field outside software could have been patented and it did not make sense for technical inventions, which happened to use computers to be excluded from the system. Conservatives supported the Commission's proposal because we believe that codification of the existing position would also have avoided raising complicated issues of the validity of existing patents across Europe or allowing current unpatentable technologies to claim new patents. This would have allowed European businesses the chance to develop ideas with certainty as to their legal position. It would also have reduced the pressure from companies holding permissive American software patents that wished to gain an extension of their patent rights in Europe. We did, however, support a number of amendments to clarify the text and ensure that generic software patents were specifically excluded.

The European Parliament voted on the Commission's proposal at the end of last year. It approved the principle of a clarifying directive by a substantial majority, thus moving the proposal to its next stage of negotiations between the EU Member Governments (Council) and the European Commission. The political objectives of providing the EU with a patent regime that explicitly excluded software and business processing was clearly established. However the Parliament also approved a wide range of amendments to the proposal, with the laudable intention of ensuring that patents would only be available for inventions incorporating software as party of a technical contribution. However many of these amendments would render the Directive completely unworkable and greatly restrict the scope of the original proposal. It is important to recognise that this Directive is intended to clarify the existing EU patents regime, and is not, of itself a free-standing piece of legislation. Many of the amendments would introduce new concepts into the law covering all patents and also extend patent restrictions to new ranges of products where innovations can quite justifiably, be protected at the moment.

The Directive has now moved to the Council where the Governments of the Member States are amending it. Their negotiations are confidential but they are expected to propose a text close to the position which the European Commission bought forward originally and similar to the pragmatic approach which Conservatives support. We will continue to press the Commission and Council to produce a revised proposal that will achieve its political objectives, be fully compatible with existing patent law, and provide a clearly understood regime for inventions. In the next Parliament, we will not hesitate to propose further amendments that will safeguard Europe's approach to generic software patents.

Yours sincerely,

Roger Helmer MEP