In the software patent Directive legislation procedure it is now the turn of Parliament to again adopt a set of reasonable amendments to be ignored, deleted, and countered with even more extreme wordings in Council.
FFII has a list of proposed amendments here.
I would like to make one proposal of my own.
We always hear from the other side that we are not supposed to panic, because nothing is supposed to change anyway by this Directive, which is only about clarifying the present state of the law.
That does not really convince me. However, we have right now as recital 14 of the Council text:
(14) The legal protection of computer-implemented inventions does not necessitate the creation of a separate body of law in place of the rules of national patent law. The rules of national patent law remain the essential basis for the legal protection of computer-implemented inventions. This Directive simply clarifies the present legal position with a view to securing legal certainty, transparency, and clarity of the law and avoiding any drift towards the patentability of unpatentable methods such as obvious or non-technical procedures and business methods.
I would like to amend this by adding one sentence:
"Nothing in this Directive shall be construed to extend patentability beyond the present legal position."
Assume for a moment that the Big Spender Alliance's efforts are successful and the Directive is not simply voted down completely in Parliament now, as well it should be in my opinion.
Then this is the very least our side should be able to get adopted.
After all, the other side has insisted time after time that they don't really want to change anything. All my proposal would do is to get that laid down in writing for later reference.
Somehow I am not ever so confident that the "no need to change anything" rhetoric would be still operative once we move on to the implementation legislation in 25 Member States.
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Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at April 29, 2005 04:41 PM