Story

The meeting was chaired by the Dutch minister of agriculture, Cees Veerman.

Few people had expected the appearance of the Polish undersecretary of state (= minister) at the Ministry of Science and Information Technology, Wlodzimierz Marcinski. He came personally to Brussels to present Poland's point of view, because the permanent representatives of Poland at the EU had been put under great pressure by the Dutch Presidency to accept the text, rather than to communicate the wishes of the Polish government.

Germany's minister of agriculture, Renate Künast of the Green Party, did not attend the meeting. Instead a diplomat from the German representation in Brussels was sent with instructions to nod off the text. Given the conflicting pressures from her party and from the government, this may have been all she was able to do.. We are curious to learn how, in absensce of the minister, the german diplmat, Dr. Peter Witt, dealt with the questions of agricultural policy that were put before him during the meeting.

It is not yet clear what will happen next. With luck, the Luxembourg presidency will take a less dogmatic line, and allow the text to be reconsidered. However, it is not impossible that today's text could resurface again as an "uncontroversial" A-item in an Agricultural Council in January or in the Competitiveness Council of March.

FFII UK Press Release

Tuesday 21 December -- FFII welcomes the decision of Poland to remove the A-item adopting the Directive' COM 2002/0047 (COD) "On the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions" (Software Patent Directive) from the agenda of today's meeting.

The fact that the unilateral declarations of concerns by member states contained more text than the actual directive itself, only accentuated the proposed text's woeful lack of support and lack of democratic legitimacy.

National governments were mislead into believing they were getting a Directive which allowed patents only for computer-controlled technical devices. Instead, most patent professionals believe the proposed text would have forced Member States to uphold the furthest reaches of current EPO practice -- so that, in the words of patent attorney Simon Davies, "all inventions that might reasonably be considered as within the realm of computer science, for example procedures at the operating system level to improve machine operation, or generic algorithms, techniques and functionality at the application level" would be patentable.

Even the UK Government, one of the strongest supporters of the proposed text, admitted that "Clarity will only come from the first test case in a European court.

FFII hopes that, inspired by today's developments, the Council of Ministers will now go back and thoroughly revise the text, to make it quite clear what they do and what they do not want to see patented. This should be clearly written into the legislation, not left for the courts to decide.