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EU Rapporteur Publishes Software Patent
Sanity writes "Michel Rocard, economist and former French prime minister, has just published a report on the European Software Patents Directive. He is the European Parliament's draftsperson or "rapporteur" on the directive, and so it is likely that his views will be taken very seriously. The anti-software patent lobby group FFII like the report, saying that it "contains all the necessary ingredients for a directive that achieves what most member state governments say they want to achieve: to exclude computer programs from patentability while allowing computer-controlled technical inventions to be patented." The Directive will have its second reading on July 6th."
Working Document
on the patentability of the inventions controlled by computer (2002/0047 (COD))
Rapporteur:
Michel Rocard
The Council of Ministers finally adopted a joint position on the patentability of the inventions implemented by computer to allow that the debate in second reading is held. Five Member States voted while letting know in writing that they voted to resolve the procedure, but which they wished to see the text modified by the Parliament. Our dissension of the first turn was heard.
This text is essential as well economically (a few tens of billion annual euros are concerned) that politically or philosophically: it acts of the statute of the diffusion of the knowledge and the ideas in the company.
It is a short, but bearing text on an extremely complex matter. For two years that it is in debate, it has clearly appeared that in the difficulty of finding solutions consensual, the dissensions on the definitions and the misunderstandings are much more important than the dissensions on the bottom.
I made draw up a note of precise and detailed analysis of the subject. It is long. At the time when I write this letter to you, I am not sure of being able to translate it into English.
I however hope to give it to you to all in French and English. But in fact, for the debate without text from April 21 in Brussels, I prefer, before depositing my proposals for an amendment officially, to propose to you to think together on the problem which is posed to us, and of his intellectual treatment.
Because in this short text, we have in fact only two problems serious, likely to nourish a conflict with the Commission and the Council: that of the delimitation of what is patentable and of what is not it, and interworking. If the Parliament and finally the Council follow the orientations that we propose to them, the problem of interworking will be regulated of this fact.
It is thus necessary to start by being occupied of the delimitation. Which is the question? It results from contradiction between the legal system and the inherited tradition on the one hand, and the needs for remuneration for the investments and safety for the large-scale industry supported by the recent drifts for the patentability in the United States, and to a lesser extent with the European Patent Office, on the other hand. All our legal systems, and especially Convention on the European patent signed in 1973 in Munich establish clearly that the software is not patentable (art 52.2. CBE). However there exists more than 150000 patents of this type in the United States, without legal base and about 50000 with the European Patent Office, at dubious legal base and unequally valid in front of our national laws.
The striking down development of data processing has extended for twenty years with all the branches from our industries and our services. Beyond the professional uses, there is no more one object of everyday consumption which does not comprise integrated softwares: portable cars, telephones, televisions, video tape recorders, washing machines, orders of elevators, etc.
All that is expensive to develop. It is normal, and desirable, that industry can patent the results of its investments to ensure remuneration and to protect them from it from the counterfeit and the unfair competition. The regulation of the physical processes implemented within the inventions is a very old problem: it took innumerable forms, mechanics or tires in particular. To develop of such regulations, patentable when they were themselves innovating in their realization, was extremely expensive.
To replace by software, whose production and development cost is much weaker, an enormous economy represents.
That pushed with their multiplication.
But a software is of another nature.
It is about the immaterial one.
In fact, a software is the combination in an original work of one or more algorithms, i.e. a whole of mathematical formulas.
However like said it Albert Einstein, a math
beware of the pdf.
5 pages of bureaucrat speak i am not going to post on slashdot.
This space is intentionally staring blankly at you
The comitee of Legal Affairs, which is responsible for this directive in the European Parliament, has discussed the topic this morning:
http://wiki.ffii.org/?Juri050421En
Please help to make a transcript on IRC (irc.debian.org #ffii) and on the wiki page.
What Michel Rocard has done is specify that to be patentable, a software must be controlling the forces of nature. Thus simulations are out, software controlling a robotic arm is in.
... what then?
Light is a force of nature. The process by which pixels are displayed (digital/electrical, or analog/chemical) are forces of nature. Hell, electricity is a force of nature, and the movement of electrons is what defines every action and calculation of a computer.
Seems to me it would be pretty easy to define any calculation as "controlling the forces of nature" and make every possible software algorithm patentable anyway.
It's a good idea, but an unwise comprimise IMHO. Keeping patent moghuls from privatizing and monopolizing knowledge is like trying to hold a flooding river within its banks. Open the dyke just a little as a comprimise and you'll find your town just as flooded as if there were no dyke to begin with. Ditto for making some software patentable. If some of it is patentable, then eventually all of it will be. It will only be a matter of how deep you look into the physics of nature before patents apply. Hell, taken to an extreme, there are even now tentative theories that suggest information itself may well be a basic force of nature
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