The final vote on two of the most controversial information society Directives, the Directive on Software Patents and the Directive on the Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights has been delayed once more. The IPRE directive was withdrawn last minute from the 9 February plenary agenda of the European Parliament. On 6 February the Council presented a compromise.

The IPRE directive was designed to prevent piracy and counterfeiting in the EU, but the scope and criminal sanctions were extended to infringement of any IP right, for example to peer-to-peer file exchangers. The new scope was strongly criticised by consumer organisations, telecoms operators and internet service providers. They claimed it would force them into endless legal proceedings with representatives from the music and

EDRI-member Electronic Frontier Finland collected 2295 signatures in one week on its online petition against software patents. The petition was presented to the Finnish parliament on 14 November.

Ville Oksanen, vice chairman of EFFI, who acted as the head of the delegation comments:"We were received by MPs from every major parliamentary group, which was a great success considering that the topic of the petition was relatively obscure. The feedback from the MPs was also very promising. They are going to follow the process closely and EFFI will be invited to parliamentary hearings. The letter from Linus Torvalds was also well known and one group (Swedish minority party) even pledged to support his position."

The European Parliament yesterday drastically altered the proposed directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions. A long summer of intensive lobbying by an impressive European alliance of open source advocates, economists and CEOs of small and medium-sized businesses has paid off.

One of the great fears about software patents, the extension to business methods like Amazon's one-click shopping, is effectively answered by the new Recital 13a. This states: "A computer-implemented business method, data processing method or other method in which the only contribution to the state of the art is non-technical cannot constitute a patentable invention."

In itself, software is excluded from patentability. So are any forms of information processing, handling and presentation. According to Recital

European Parliament rapporteur Arlene McCarthy has withdrawn the draft directive on software patents. The directive will now go back to the committee stage for some more work. A new vote is scheduled for the plenary sessions between 22 and 25 September.

Even though officially the European Patent Office does not allow for patents on software, many trifle software inventions and business methods have already been accepted.

Today, both online and off-line demonstrations were organised in a final attempt to change a proposed EU-directive on software patents. The European Parliament will vote on the proposal in the plenary session on 1 September. The demonstrations were organised by FFII. In an open letter to the members of parliament, FFII points out that the proposal 'would make calculation rules and business methods such as Amazon One Click Shopping patentable, as in the USA.' Moreover, FFII fears that the 30.000 patents on software that have already been granted by the European Patent Office 'against the letter and spirit of the current law', would become enforceable in Europe, making it impossible for national courts to continue to revoke these patents.

Resistance against the proposal was also strongly voiced by a group of 10

Electric Frontier Finland is gearing up its campaign against software patents while the crucial vote is closing up. As part of this project the organisation sent an open letter to Finnish MEPs, in which it asked for support for amendments on the final report of JURI, the committee on legal affairs from the European Parliament. Piia-Noora Kauppi (EPP-ED) and Uma Aaltonen (Greens/EFA) have already responded to the letter and promised to support the amendments.

Open letter EFFI (29.07.2003)
http://www.effi.org/julkaisut/kirjeet/avoinkirje-2003-07-29.en.html

(Contribution by Kai Puolamauki, EFFI)

A proposal to hasten the plenary vote about the EU Software Patent directive was stopped just in time. The voting date now remains set at the 1st of September. The extra time seems extra important now that the public debate about the implications of this directive has only just taken of.

Last Monday, the French Social Democrat Michel Rocard, president of the EP Culture Committee and former prime minister of France, showed himself an avid opponent of the directive in an interview with the French Daily Liberation.

The European Parliament's Committee for Legal Affairs and the Internal Market (JURI) voted Tuesday 17 June about a list of proposed amendments to the planned software patent directive. It was the third and last in a series of committee votes. The results will be presented to the parliament in plenary early in September. The other two commissions (Culture, Industry) had chosen to more or less clearly forbid software patents. The rapporteur of the JURI committee, Arlene McCarthy (UK socialist) also claimed to be aiming for a "restrictive harmonisation of the status quo" and "exclusion of software as such, algorithms and business methods from patentability".