Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-09-23-Speech-2-040"
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"en.20030923.2.2-040"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, what is the real issue here? The real issue concerns protecting the intellectual property that is the result of innovations in computing. There are two conflicting legal procedures in play: on the one hand patentability and on the other, copyright. We and I believe the vast majority of speakers in this House, Commissioner, believe that the standard form of protection is copyright. Whereas journalists or novelists know that their text is protected by copyright, they cannot then claim the syntax, the morphology, the vocabulary and the grammar of the language they are using as their own. The same must apply to software, because software also uses language.
You claimed in your statement, Commissioner, which was extremely aggressive and even threatening with regard to the criticism inspired by your draft directive, that software as such was not covered by patentability. You must not, however, treat people like idiots. Furthermore, your directive is at best ambiguous, because your definition of a computer-implemented invention in Article 2(a), can just as easily apply to software. Of course, in Article 4 of the draft directive, you appear to limit patentability to inventions, and I quote, ‘susceptible of industrial application’. This is a concept, however, that you have been very careful not to define. We all know that US multinationals have managed to patent aspects as trivial as clicking a button to close a window on a screen, or the idea of alerting users by means of a tune to the fact that they have received an email, or even using a colour to underline words that need to be corrected when a text is revised – and textual revision is susceptible of industrial applications in typography or printing. I will also mention the electronic ‘shopping basket’ used in e-commerce. Young creators have even managed to patent the 35-hour working week imposed by the previous government of my country.
Why, then, is such a text being proposed in this Parliament? Do the interests of the European Patent Office, which is funded according to the number of patents filed, have no part to play in this? The fact is, Commissioner, that there was a strategic choice to make: either to fall in line with the patenting practice of US multinationals – which is what you appear to be starting to do – or to protect the specific characteristics of European law and refuse to let abusive patents have any effect. You have clearly not taken the latter choice and it would be reasonable to believe that your directive does not tally with the legitimate interests of European creators."@en1
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