Fwd: [Patents] EU Parlament Accepts Petitions

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-----Original Message-----
From: Hartmut Pilch <[email protected]>
Date: Wed, 1 Oct 2003 15:48:26 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: [Patents] EU Parlament Accepts Petitions

but only for handling by JURI, after interventions of JURI members and
European Commission, who asked the Petition Committee to discard the
petitions.

See

	http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/peti1001/

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel.
+49-89-18979927
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation	    
http://swpat.ffii.org/
270,000 votes 2000 firms against software patents   
http://noepatents.org/

----

Parliament Accepts Petitions Against Software Patents

2003/10/01

For immediate Release

At the Hearing of the Petition Committee in the Parliament yesterday 
evening at 18:00, Anthony Howard, a former employee of the UK Patent 
Office who is handling the Software Patent Directive Project for DG 
Internal Market under Frits Bolkestein at the European Commission, 
asked the Parliament to discard the two petitions against software 
patents, signed by a quarter million european citizens, which were 
presented to it. Very few MEPs attended the evening session, and among 
those who attended were prominent software patentability advocates 
from the Legal Affairs Commission (JURI) who vocally supported 
Howard's call. However the Petition Committee did not follow their 
requests. Acceptance of the petition will mean that the Legal Affairs 
Commission, which voted against meaningful limits on patentability in 
June 2003 and was overruled by the plenary vote on 24th of September, 
will receive another opportunity to explain its position. 


Details 

Media Contacts 

About the FFII -- www.ffii.org 
About the Eurolinux Alliance -- www.eurolinux.org 
Permanent URL of this Press Release 

Annotated Links

Details

By coincidence, the Petition Committee debated yesterday the 2 
petitions on software patentability, less than a week after the first 
reading vote on the directive proposal. These 2 petitions are: 

The Eurolinux petition signed by a quarter million European citizens 
and software professionnals accessible at petition.eurolinux.org/ 

The petition signed by 33 leading European computer and software 
scientists accessible at: www.upgrade-cepis.org/issues/2003/3/up4-
3Petition.pdf

The European Commission was first invited to formulate its 
observations. The speaker was Anthony Howard, the person in charge of 
drafting the directive proposal in the responsible unit of the 
Internal Market DG. He was visibly uncomfortable, made no observations 
on substance, and asked the committee to declare both petitions 
ineligible because they were intervening in an ongoing legislative 
process. 

The representatives of petitioners were then given 5 minutes each to 
express their viewpoints. Bernard Lang represented Eurolinux, and 
Philippe Aigrain spoke for the scientists. 

Both thanked the Parliament for its vote, and stressed the importance 
of keeping its consistency and orientation in the next steps of the 
legislative process. 

Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) were then invited to debate. 
Willi Rothley (PSE-DE) intervened in a remarkably aggressive tone. As 
Bernard Lang had mentioned that petitioners had been proud of European 
democracy at the occasion of the vote, and that he felt then in a kind 
of festive mood, Mr. Rothley warned that after festive moods come 
hangovers, and that the second reading might be very different. He 
also asked the committee to declare the petitions ineligible. Mr. 
Rothley is Vice-President of the JURI committee and not a member of 
the Committee of Petitions, but all MEPs are invited to attend 
meetings and express views on subjects of their interest. 

Mrs. Janelly Fourtou (PPE-FR) supported Mr. Rothley's line. She also 
asked for the petitions to be considered ineligible. 

Jan Dhaene (Green, Belgium) and Marco Cappato (NI, Italy) spoke in 
favour of the petitions, saying that not only were they eligible, but 
the Committee of Petitions should debate them on substance, as 
citizens and developers are likely to suffer from the abusive granting 
of software patents by the EPO. 

The meeting Chairman declared that, beyond any possible doubt, the 
petitions were eligible, because the right to petition on a matter 
currently under legislation is recognised by the Treaty. However he 
also decided that, since the intention of petitioners was clearly to 
intervene in pending legislation, the Petition Commitee should not 
debate the petitions on substance, but simply transfer them to the 
committee competent on substance, in this case JURI. 


Media Contacts

mail: 
media at ffii org 
phone: 
FFII Munich (German, English and French): 0049/89/18979927 
Benjamin Henrion (French and English): 0032/498/292771 or 
0032/10/454779 

Jonas Maebe (Dutch and English): +32-485-36-96-45 

Dieter Van Uytvanck (Dutch and English): +32-499-16-70-10 

Erik Josefsson (Swedish and English): +46-707-696567 

Alex Macfie (English): +44 7901 751753 

Joaquim Carvalho (Portugues and English): +35-1-93-6169633 

More Contacts to be supplied upon request


About the FFII -- www.ffii.org
The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) is a non-
profit association registered in Munich, which is dedicated to the 
spread of data processing literacy. FFII supports the development of 
public information goods based on copyright, free competition, open 
standards. More than 300 members, 500 companies and 40,000 supporters 
have entrusted the FFII to act as their voice in public policy 
questions in the area of exclusion rights (intellectual property) in 
data processing. 


About the Eurolinux Alliance -- www.eurolinux.org
The EuroLinux Alliance for a Free Information Infrastructure is an 
open coalition of commercial companies and non-profit associations 
united to promote and protect a vigourous European Software Culture 
based on copyright, open standards, open competition and open source 
software such as Linux. Corporate members or sponsors of EuroLinux 
develop or sell software under free, semi-free and non-free licenses 
for operating systems such as GNU/Linux, MacOS or MS Windows. 


Permanent URL of this Press Release
http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/peti1001/index.en.html 


Annotated Links
Europarl 2003-09-24: Amended Software Patent Directive 
Consolidated version of the amended directive "on the patentability of 
computer-implemented inventions" for which the European Parliament 
voted on 2003-09-24.