The Polish government has announced today it can not support the proposal from the EU Council for a Software Patents directive, since it is too vague, and leaves too much room for patents on pure software and business methods. This means there is no majority in the Council anymore to formally ratify the agreement that was reached on 18 May 2004. On 1 November 2004 the voting-procedure in the EU Council was modified to allow the new Member States to have equal amounts of votes. With the Polish 'NO', the Council will have to re-negotiate the draft directive once more within the Council, before being able to present it to the European Parliament for a second reading.

The text was already very problematic, due to growing political differences between government representatives of member states and members of different national parliaments. The official reason for the long delay in the ratification of the Council position was the fact that not all translations had been approved, but behind closed doors a lot of lobbying has been going on.

According to spokesperson Jan Macek of FFII Poland, the Polish refusal of the Council position will give critical member states such as Austria, Belgium, Luxembourg, Latvia, Denmark and Italy a chance to re-open the debate on earlier modification proposals. These proposals would bring the draft directive much more in line with the intentions of the European Parliament, but were declined by the Irish Presidency of the EU.

On 24 September 2003, the European Parliament voted against all proposals that would make software patentable and added additional safeguards, such as freedom of publication and interoperation. In January 2004, the Irish Presidency of the Council proposed a text deleting most of the amendments introduced by the Parliament and lifting restrictions to the direct patentability of computer programs, data structures and process descriptions. Under this proposed compromise, 'computer-implemented' algorithms and business methods, protocols and data formats would be inventions in the sense of patent law, and the publication of a functional description of a patented idea, even for interoperability purposes, would constitute a patent infringement.

FFII, ISOC Poland and NoSoftwarePatents.com Joint Press Release (17.11.2004)
http://kwiki.ffii.org/PolandDoesNotSupportCouncilVersionEn

Statement Polish government (last item on the page, 17.11.2004)
http://www.kprm.gov.pl/441_12649.htm