Slashdot Mirror
EU Moves Towards Single European Patent Standard
theodp writes "A European Parliament committee Tuesday moved toward setting the first pan-European standard for software patents, but outlawed the U.S. practice of patenting business methods, such as Amazon's one-click Internet shopping. 'The European law sets the right benchmark rather than the looser U.S. system,' said the director of public policy for Europe at the Business Software Alliance, which represents 20 software companies including Microsoft and Apple. Amazon representatives in Brussels declined to comment on the new European legislation."
It sounds like they have learned from some of the mistakes our
patent system has made.
Under the European law, software companies would obtain
exclusive rights only for programs that demonstrate novelty in
their "technical contribution."
Their reasoning: "We don't want to arrive at a model where
in the U.S. everything under the sun can be patented,"
I think they are approaching this from a better angle. I still
disagree with the general notion of patenting algorithms as
such. I don't think algorithms are invented any more than
mathematical truths are invented, rather they are discovered.
IMO, there is a difference and a patent shouldn't be granted on
that. Although, I will admit there is room to disagree with
that position.
It looks like they will be avoiding the major abuses we are
experiencing though, since you can patent a novel approach to
hand writing recognition, but not hand writing recognition in
general.
Now, the question is how do we get the U.S. government to adopt
this standard? Will it be like the Metric system, where we are
too entrenched to switch to a better system? Let's hope not for
our sakes.
Doug Tolton
"The destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isn't." -John Galt
Although the European Patent Convention (EPC) says that "programs for computers" are not patentable whereas the (draft) Directive explicitly says that "computer-implemented inventions" are (art. 52), there is actually no difference:
The EPC was never meant to prevent patents on computer-implemented inventions; the clause that prevents patent on "computer programmes" simply has no effect -- patent lawyers agree that they are either "technical" (and patentable) or "non-technical" (and not patentable). Unlike the US patent system, the European patent system only protects "technical" inventions.
Patents on "technical" computer programmes are not that bad -- after all, they are technical inventions that just happen to be implemented with computers.
The real problem is that patent offices tend to view all computer software as "technical" because a computer is technical. This results in patents on algorithms, business methods, etc. that just happen to be implemented with computers.
The draft EU Directive does a lot to clarify this: It says several times that computer programmes are not technical just because they run on a computer. It also says that algorithms are not patentable and that a patent on a technical invention that uses an algorithm does not cover the algorithm itself (yeah, the Yahoo editor obviously did not read the documents; s/he even got the date wrong: 2003-06-16 was Monday, not Tuesday).
The rationale clearly says that they don't want algorithms and business models to be convered.
These clarifications will actually result in less software patents because all the bogous software patents that are not patents on computer-implemented technical inventions but on computer-implemented algorithms, business models, etc., are now so clearly outlawed by the explicit text of the Directive that every patent officer should get it.
Claus