July 6, 2005 9:08 am Dave Neary General

Software patents

Jordi:

The commission can’t come back on this one. The process is a bit twisted, but this is the end of the road. The process is

  1. The commission writes the law
  2. In parallel, the council of ministers and the parliament vote the law, possibly making reccommendations for changes
  3. The commission reviews the reccommendations, and approves or refuses them
  4. The council of ministers votes on the resulting text (or a modified version they agree on by qualified majority)
  5. The resulting text gets sent to the parlianent, where they can accept the text presented, make amendments to it, or reject it as presented. Any modification or rejection requires an absolute majority of MEPs
  6. If they make changes and accept it, the resulting text must be approved by an arbitration committee made up half of MEPs and half of ministers on the council of ministers

We were at the second last stage today, and if the law has been rejected, the only option that the commission now has is to modify the law, and go through the whole process again (the infamous restart requested by JURI some months ago).

Given the completely polarised result of the vote, I’m now wondering whether JURI (which was favourable to the parliament’s position some months ago) rejected all of Rocard’s amendments to polarise the parliament and avoid a dodgy law going through on a split decision.

Fair play to the FFII. I hate to bring it up in our hour of glory, but doesn’t this mean we stay at the current ambiguous “software patents are not allowed, but are granted anyway” situation, though? Wasn’t one of the goals of this law to regularise the situation one way or the other?

2 Responses

  1. Tassos Basosukos Says:
    July 6th, 2005 at 11:44 pm

    The result is due to yesterdays turnaround by lobbyers to shoot down their own bill, because they were afraid of the amendments passing, particurlarly the ones that forced full disclosure.

  2. Jordi Says:
    July 7th, 2005 at 12:31 am

    Dave, even if we’re left in the same status quo as before, current law says Software is not subject to be patented. If the EPO does accept such patents, that’s another problem that can be fixed now.

    I know the ammendments were the way to go, but given last night I went to bed being totally convinced that we were going to lose, this is great news for me.

    Nothing stops a new directive that sets the ammendments in stone. The first battle, we have won. There are a few more to come, surely.