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EU onduidelijk over software patenten
decoy - 25.09.2003 13:28
EU is nogsteeds niet duidelijk over software patenten (engels)
The european commission started an initiative to evaluate the merit of
patenting "computer implemented inventions" i.e. software already in
december 2000. The European Patents Agreement of 1977 explicitly excludes
software from the patenting scheme, yet, a large number of technical
innovations which were based on software developments were patented, thus
the commission considers actually including software itself into the
patents agreement. Until 2000 the European Patent Office has actually
granted patents on 30000 software based innovations despite this
exclusion. Even after that, patents on software based solutions
were granted. In 2002 the company Nippo Electronics - for
example - were granbted a patent for webshops. This covers any
webpage which offers direct interactive shopping applications.
Ultimately, however, the evaluation process lead to a decision not
to include software into the patent system, despite the fact that such a
regulation does exist in the USA. For example, the company
Networksolutions was granted a patent on the utility "nslookup" in may
2003. This program enables a user or administrator on a Unix system to
send queries for names of computers on the internet. The reaction of the
open source community was, to move over to alternative programs doing the
same job. The most famous case of software patent conflicts in
2003 involved the software company SCO which has instigated a campaign of
court procedures against IBM because the latter have opened the source
code of their Unix based operating system AIX. SCO claimed that this was
an infringement against btheir pending patent rights on code contained
therein which SCO has - according to their own claim - contributed to AIX.
The ensuing chaos and hostilities between IBM, SCO and later also the
software producer Novell has lead to another initiative of the European
Union to include software into their patenting scheme. The Parliament was
to decide on whether the legal situation should be made the same as in
the USA to avoid such discrepancies. This decision was postponed though,
because it seemed that the advocates of software patenting have simply
forged statistical data about companies presumably wanting a software
patent law. The Patent office spokesperson Arlene McCarthy has been a
strong supporter of the initiative so far, and obviously does not even
stop at information manipulation practices to get the Patent Office's will
made into a regulation.
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| Read more about: europa media | | supplements | | | english | M02 - 25.09.2003 22:26
Please next time use an english title + introduction when the whole article itself is in english.
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