EU Patent Wars to Resume

replicant108 writes "Ciaran O'Riordan of the FSFE gives a concise analysis of why the EU Software Patent Wars will resume this winter. Apparently the pro-patent side have changed their strategy — this time they plan to bypass the legislative powers and target the judiciary instead. The goal is to transfer power from the national courts (which often rule against software patents) to a specially-created European Patent Court which will be controlled by the pro-software patent EPO!"

Comments

Re:Won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

I am not very familiar with US legislation but here in Yurop courts can't create laws, they can decide only based on existing laws. So if the legislation (in this case: the European Comitee and the European Parliament, and later the national parliaments) don't create those laws, how could they decide anything?

Those laws dont' do anything on their own though. Someone has to act upon them. First the executive arm of government and then the judiciary (if it reaches them) apply their interpretation to that law.

The EPO currently "interprets" Article 52 of the European Patent Convention, which states that only inventions are patentable and that programs for computers shall not be regarded as inventions, as meaning that programs for computers are in fact patentable. If they controlled the courts, they would have total power to enforce this "interpretation".

The law is irrelevant if the court chooses to intepret "black" as "white".

Re:And they still wonder?

[sepluv]

The main point of the EU is to ensure that trade rules (e.g.: patent rules) don't differ between the member states so there can be an efficient common market. Not having lots of different complicated legal systems is probably a good thing (whatever the system is), and, whatsmore, most of the EU institutions (e.g.: the parliament; most member states) went against software patents in the end. The unaccountable EPO (who are more like a Quango full of civil servants than a democratic government or parliament) won't give up though.

I'm not, in favour, generally, of extension of the the powers of EU instutions or the proposed EU constitution. However, surely if your state were to drop out of the EU, these trade deals would still happen but in an untransparent, unaccountable way with no parliament or constitution involved (and more likely to involve the receipt of nice pretty brown envelopes from everyone's favourite monopoly).