According to the Financial Times, the JURI-approved text of the
draft Directive remains similar to that recently approved by the
Council of Ministers – a fact that has infuriated opponents of the
draft.
Eva Lichtenberger and Monica Frassoni, of the Greens / European
Free Alliance, said the vote "opens the doors for the software
market's dinosaurs."
According to their joint statement:
"Though all political groups claim that they
want to exclude 'pure' software patents from the directive, the
pro-big business majority in the committee succeeded in creating
dangerous loopholes. A definition of the difference between
software and technique, for example, says that software can be
considered to be the novel feature in an invention, and thus is
patentable."
Their fear – shared by many – is that Europe gets a liberal
regime of patentability, similar to that of the US.
The European Parliament is in the process of reconsidering the
draft Directive. First time round, the Parliament extensively
altered the draft text. But its amendments were rejected by the
Council of Ministers in March, after a 10-month delay and intensive
lobbying by groups on both sides of the debate.
The draft was therefore returned to the Parliament for a second
reading, for which the Parliamentary rapporteur, former French
Prime Minister Michel Rocard, has put forward a total of 256
amendments.
These amendments seek to restrict the scope of the draft by
forbidding the grant of patents for “the treatment, the
manipulation, the representation and the presentation of
information through software”.
Patents should only be granted for software that controlled a
physical process or a “controllable force of nature,” according to
Rocard.
The Financial Times reports that, in a series of tight votes,
JURI members yesterday rejected most of Rocard's proposals.
“European industry is satisfied with the outcome of today's
vote,” Mark MacGann, President of technology trade group EICTA told
the FT. “We will now urge the entire parliament to follow suit. It
is a pretty good result.”
Jonas Maebe from anti-software patents group the Foundation for
a Free Information Infrastructure, commented:
"Formally, nothing is lost. All amendments
rejected in JURI can be tabled again for plenary (or different
amendments), and those adopted now still have to be adopted again
in plenary as well. In practice, this is a slap in the face of
millions of European SMEs, consumers and hundreds of thousands of
European citizens.”
The draft now goes forward to a full Parliamentary vote,
expected around 6th July. While the opinion of the legal affairs
committee is influential, MEPs are not obliged to follow it.
