EU Patent Examiners Warn Parliament Will Have "No Power"

zoobab writes "The Staff Union of the European Patent Organisation sent a letter to the President of the European Parliament, warning that after the EU accedes to the European Patent Convention, there is a risk that the European Parliament would be 'circumvented' as a legislator. The European Patent Organisation is in no way a model of democracy: national patent offices are in power, there is no parliament involved in the decision-making process, and diplomatic conferences are held behind closed doors. There are plans to create a central patent court in Europe, which would operate in a democratic vacuum, not counterbalanced by any legislative assembly, in particular not the European Parliament. Such a central patent court could also validate software patents via caselaw (as the German Supreme Court recently did with the Microsoft FAT patent). And Microsoft, IBM, and SAP are lobbying in Brussels not to reopen consideration of the software patent directive."

Comments

Re:Software is simply not of patent-able matter.

[Hurricane78]

I think it is fundamentally wrong to separate software from (other) ideas. After all, software is nothing more than a written down idea.

But I think that no idea should be “patentable”. I even think that such a process should not exist at all, since in reality it is 1. not enforceable anyway, and 2. only stifles innovation. Since every idea builds upon other ideas.
But I still think inventors should be getting something for their ideas.

Of course unifying the two is the problem. ;)
But since it’s the only morally right choice, we have to find it anyway.

I can only see one chance for a solution: By the physics of bitspace (which are also the laws of ideas and neural networks like the brain), there is only one moment where an inventor can demand something in return: When first telling someone about it. After that, it depends on the trustworthiness of those he told it. Which is case of a company, patent office, magazine, or anyone who is not a very close friend, is absolutely zero. (If you think otherwise you are living in a delusion.)