Im März 2001 sandte das Eurolinux-Bündnis einen Brief an die Dienststelle für Gewerblichen Rechtsschutz bei der Europäische Kommission (EuK-DGR) mit der Bitte, die offenbar abgebrochene Konsultation über die Patentierbarkeit von computer-implementierbaren Organisations- und Rechenregeln wieder aufzunehmen. Der Brief formuliert ferner einige Fragen und schlägt einen methodologischen Rahmenwerk für weitere Diskussionen und Forschungen vor. Damit reagierte das Eurolinux-Bündnis auf interne Positionspapiere, in welchen die EuK-DGR sich zweifelhafter Methoden bediente, indem sie etwa die Konsultationsergebnisse versteckte und misinterpretierte, um nationale Regierungen dazu zu bewegen, ihr Projekt der Legalisierung von Softwarepatenten in Europa zu unterstützen.

München, Brussels, Amsterdam und Leipzig

The Eurolinux Alliance has sent a letter to the European Commission, asking them to resume consultations on software patentability which seem to have been interrupted.

The European Commission had called for submission of statements on the question of how software should be treated by the patent system. Between Oct 15 and Dec 15 more than 1000 programmers had sent statements describing the negative impact of software patents on their work and calling on the European Commission to stop promoting the practise of the European Patent Office (EPO), which has granted approximately 30000 patents on computer program features.

At the European Commission, the Directorate for the Internal Market (DGIM) is in charge of patent affairs and of the consultation. The patent law experts in charge at DGIM have during the past few years fully supported the position of the European Patent Office. The consultation paper published by the DGIM accurately restates this position. On Dec 21, the DGIM has hosted a conference of selected patent experts from the national governments and the European Patent Office, who unanimously encouraged the DGIM to go ahead and prepare a directive soon, so as to impose the practise of the EPO on national patent courts who have been reluctant to grant software patents.

Hartmut Pilch, spokesman of the Eurolinux Alliance of software companies and non-profit associations "European Patent Corporation" responsible of having "illegally littered the information highway" with a "big pile of poisonous waste", a "Horror Gallery of European Software Patents".

Frank Hoen, CEO of Netpresenter, the Dutch inventors web push technologies, explains:

Patenting software ideas is like prohibiting the use of certain structure elements in the plot of a novel. It is ridiculous, because the difficulty does not lie in thinking up the individual elements but in putting together a well-formed complex work. If the EPO has its way, every one of our software projects will have to be followed by a few hundred expensive patent applications. And even then, we are at the mercy of predators who don't write software but just engage in the lucrative business of milking the software industry.

Xuan Baldauf, CEO of Medianet GmbH in Leipzig and speaker of the Federation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) adds:

The patent lawyers at the Euoropean Commission are about to deprive us of our copyright to our own programs. At least they are making copyright worthless. And they are abolishing our freedom of expression. Just because programmers are a minority and most people are not fully aware of the nature of programming, these patent lawyers seem to believe that they can get away with stripping us of basic civil rights. They are acting against the Europe's legal tradition, which prohibits the patenting of programming solutions and, in general, any solution which can be validated by pure logic, without testing the effect of natural forces. The patent lawyers at the European Commission know this. They use traditional legal terms such as "technical character" and "technical contribution". But these terms no longer mean anything. They have been reduced to the status of political codewords. This reminds me of our politbureau of former days. Honnecker's friends spoke a lot about "people's democracy", "socialist realism" etc. Ten years after the peaceful revolution, I am surprised to meet again the same ambivalent Orwellian Newspeak, the same docile faith in party dogma, the same defiance of law and economics, the same reluctance to consult the public.

Meanwhile, the EC consultation has apparently stalled, and only a tiny fraction of the submitted consultation papers have been published on the DGIM website.

• Zahlen zur Petition für ein Softwarepatentfreies Europa
• Verweise
• Über Eurolinux - www.eurolinux.org
• Pressekontakt
• Feste Netzadresse dieser Presseerklärung
• Juristische Hinweise

Number of Signatures:

70000

Number of corporate sponsors:

200

Number of signatures by country:

Deutschland (16663), Frankreich (11824), Spanien (3959), Italien (3586), Dänemark (3236), Schweden (2370), Niederlande (2119), Österreich (1836), Belgien (1810), Schweiz (1440), Finnland (1360), Tschechien (974)

Number of individual signatures by company:

Siemens (112), IBM (109), Ericsson (97), Cap Gemini (82), SuSE (81), Nokia (71), France Telecom / Wanadoo (71), Alcatel (66), Hewlett Packard (52), Atos (48), MandrakeSoft (47), SNCF (French Railways) (30), ID PRO (30), Deutsche Telekom (29), SAP (29), Sun Microsystems (26), Oracle (21), EDF (21), innominate AG (21), Lucent Technologies (21), CERN (20), debis (20), Alcôve (18), Belgacom / Skynet (17), Nortel (17), Cisco (14)

Verweise

Über Eurolinux - www.eurolinux.org

Pressekontakt

Frankreich und Europa:

Jean-Paul Smets-Solanes, +33-662057614

Deutschland und Europa:

Hartmut Pilch, +49-89-18979927

Spanien:

jgb@gsyc.escet.urjc.es

Italien:

dido@prosa.it, +39-049-8774950

Niederlande:

Luuk Van Dijk, +31 6 224 97 227, siehe VOSN en Software Patenten

Dänemark und Nordeuropa:

Anne Østergaard

Belgien:

belgium@eurolinux.org

Feste Netzadresse dieser Presseerklärung

http://www.ffii.org/verein/leute

Juristische Hinweise

Linux ist ein eingetragenes Warenzeichen von Linus Torvalds.
Windows ist ein eingetragenes Warenzeichen von Microsoft Inc.
MacOS ist ein eingetragenes Warenzeichen von Apple Inc.
Alle anderen Warenzeichen gehören ihren jeweiligen Eigentümern.