EU Parliament Approves Software Patents

AnteTempore writes "The voting has just ended. Few good and several bad amendments were accepted. The directive proposal was accepted: 361 for, 135 against, 28 abstentions. The precise numbers and results for each amendment will be available on europarl.eu.int tomorrow." Reader swentel submits this report on the vote (French) with slightly different numbers (364 voting yes, 153 No, 33 abstaining) but just as bad. Watch this story for updates. Update: 09/24 15:44 GMT by T : Dr.Seltsam writes to say that the early reports are "not quite correct. The German publisher Heise states in this article, that the vote concerned strong changes on the directive." In particular, "pure software patents will not be allowed." Google's translation engine does a decent job with the German.

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FFII: "This has become our directive"

[infolib]

Europarl votes for Real Limits on Patentability

FFII News -- For Immediate Release -- Please Redistribute
See http://swpat.ffii.org/#news

Now we will have to see whether the European Commission is committed to "harmonisation and clarification" or only to patent owner interests.

Yesterday's threats uttered by Bolkestein against the European Parliament suggest the latter.

The detailed results are available on our site

http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/plen0923/

It will now be our job to help the European Parliament assert itself against attempts by Bolkestein and patent lawyers wearing the hat of national governments to crush the directive project.

The current text has some remaining contraditions in it, but basically the thrust has been turned around. It has become our directive which we must help the European Parliament to defend. This is also a question of the European Parliament's role in an emerging democratic Europe. On the whole this is very good news for the EU.

--
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/