Erik Abele wrote:
arghhh, without comments:
'EU Parliament Approves Software Patents' http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/03/09/24/ 1253227.shtml?tid=155&tid=185&tid=99
Don't panic:
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Date: Wed, 24 Sep 2003 16:31:21 +0200 From: Philippe Aigrain <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Freesw] Vote in Parliament on software patentability
The detailed votes (with nominal votes) are - in MSWord format ... - at:
http://www.europarl.eu.int/direct/documents/fr/vote/Resultats/Mercredi/Appels
nominaux 2003-09-24.doc
Contrarily to what you may hear or read from Reuters, this is truly a victory against extension of patentability. Amendements have been voted that completely overturn the original meaning of the directive to make it a text that excludes from patentability any thing beyond the use fo forces of nature to control physical effects and exclude explicitly any form of information processing. In addition an amendment explicitly stating than software claims can not be accepted has been voted.For specialists 69-70-71-72 and first part of 55 + interoperability exception have gone through.
I guess that the Green and GUE have voted against the global report because they are afraid that this might be manipulated in the further political and implementation proces (in particular they wanted another version of the definition of technical - amendment 55 second half instead of 6 to go through, but it was not even submitted to vote, based on erroneous statement that 69 would be equivalent). I do not know teh outcome on one important amendment (57).
This is nonetheless a historical turning point: for the first time, a cross-party coalition has said no to the permanent extension of patents and other forms of restrictions to free and open knowledge. Already in 1995 the Parliament rejected a first version of the biotech patents directive, but this was a different coalition, much less clear, and shortlived. TO measure the importance, see the detailed vote on amendment 55 first half voted 300 to 223 with the PSE divided 2/3-1/3 and the PPE divided 1/3-2/3
The news releases announce the vote as a victory for patentability (see Reuters). Let's hope that the truth will reach even the news.
Now let's get ready for the fights in Council. The voted amendments are clearly unacceptable for those countries where the patent lobbies have key influence, as well as for the Commission, so they will do anything to get rid of them.
Philippe Aigrain www.sopinspace.com/~aigrain/en/
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... so it seems we should be careful in judging what happened.
</Steven> -- Steven Noels http://outerthought.org/ Outerthought - Open Source Java & XML An Orixo Member Read my weblog at http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/ stevenn at outerthought.org stevenn at apache.org
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