A newly amended European Parliment bill that will make all software patentable is set to come back in the next few months. Big companies want it to protect their ideas. Smaller companies don't so that research can be shared and continued. This is one way that U.S. business (the article uses amazon's patents for example) have huge influence on European law. This would make an interesting follow-up story as the bill comes back to Parliment.
Europe's tug of war over software patents
By Jennifer L. Schenker/IHT
Monday, February 2, 2004
http://www.iht.com/ihtsearch.php?id=127600&owner=&date=20040202142528
PARIS: You cannot patent software in the European Union today - except if the software is part of a separate invention or process, and even then, it depends on your country.
That can be a murky way to define a patent, both critics and supporters of the status quo would agree, and they are locked in a tempestuous tug of war to pass a new law in their favor.
On one side is big business - largely corporations with large research investments and scores of patents - which wants to make all software patentable in the EU to mirror U.S. and Japanese law and preserve their right to collect royalties and protect their work.
The opponents - made up of small and medium-size software companies, academic institutions and supporters of "open source" software, among others - want to make sure software cannot be patented at all, allowing them to create software without fear of lawsuits.
A European Parliament bill that would have made all software subject to patenting is the focal point of the outrage among technology activists. Opponents of the bill succeeded in adding amendments in September that would essentially prevent patents from being issued for most types of software. The proposal is due back in Parliament in the next few months, and the outcome is far from certain.
The opposite is also true: sometimes it is the European Union's influence that conditions US capitalism. The European antitrust Commissioner, Mario Monti, has recently announced that it has been impossible to reach a settlement with Microsoft. Teherefore Microsoft will probably have to pay a substantial penalty for breaching the European antitrust laws. This is the second time that one of the largest US companies is obliged to acknowledge the power of the European Union antitrust: the former case was when the acquisition of Honeywell by General Electric, after being cleared by the antitrust authorities in Washington, was forbidden in Brussels.
Federico