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Community Patent consultation procedure seriously flawed
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8 March 2006 (Brussels, Belgium) The EU's "Consultation on the future
of the Community Patent in Europe" has serious flaws, says the FFII,
an international information rights group based in Munich. "The first
problem with the consultation questionnaire is that it is unavailable
in most of the languages of the EU," says FFII president Pieter
Hintjens. "And when you try to answer the questionnaire, you realise
that most of the vital background information is completely
incomprehensible to the average businessperson."
The president of the FFII has sent an open letter
(http://consultation.ffii.org/Open_Letter/) to President Barroso and
the responsible Commissioners (McCreevy and Wallström), to express his
concerns with the procedure and to make four simple requests to
improve it.
The FFII has received complaints about the exclusionary nature of the
consultation from many SMEs across Europe. "We expect to receive
official EU documents in Polish", says Ignacy Miedzinski, CEO of BPSC
sa, a Polish IT firm. "Working with French, German, or English texts
is expensive and slow and a real barrier to our participation in such
consultations."
Laura Creighton, Founder of Sekans, a Swedish Venture Capital Firm,
agrees: "For such an important issue, which has been debated for
years, we would expect to see much better information provided to the
SMEs who should be involved."
In Portugal too, firms find themselves unable to take part in the
Commission's process. Joachim Carvalho, the CTO of X64 Lda., a
Portuguese IT firm, says: "It really looks like we are not supposed to
take part in this process. As far as I can see, only a specialist in
EU patent law could really answer the questionnaire."
The FFII warns that both the Commission's alternative proposals, the
Community Patent and the EPLA in combination with the London
Agreement, could lead to the EU-wide introduction of software patents.
Additionally, the current Community Patent proposal would result in
transferring judicial authority over patent law from the EU and its
member states to the European Patent Office.
Pieter Hintjens concludes: "The Commission is proposing mechanisms for
cheaper, easier patents, promoting the misconception that 'more patent
equates to more innovation'. Encouraging the patent inflation and
accepting the extension of the patent system in fields where patents
are counter-productive would be a disaster for the EU."
The FFII has prepared a detailed analysis of the Commission's
questionnaire at http://consultation.ffii.org/ and calls upon all
affected companies to read the information and to take part in the
consultation. A PDF version is available at
http://consultation.ffii.org/Downloads.
--
Neil Williams
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http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
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