Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2005-07-05-Speech-2-016"
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"en.20050705.6.2-016"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, what we are deciding today is whether innovation will be possible in the IT sector and whether small and medium-sized businesses will have the freedom they need in order to develop. All and sundry – the patent’s opponents as much as its advocates – are currently asserting that that is what they want.
Nobody is openly admitting that they want to patent software. The difference is to be found in the amendments themselves, and in the number of back doors to be opened up to the patenting of software. What makes a difference is whether there is a clear dividing line between technical inventions, which will of course continue to be protected by patents, and software, which is, in any case, already protected by copyright. The question is whether we opt for ten to fifteen back doors and the attendant legal uncertainty or for small and medium-sized businesses’ freedom to develop?
If, today, you decide in favour of the Council’s Common Position, you will be choosing to leave the barn door wide open to the patent business as a whole, which will progressively take over the European market. You will thereby be voting for software to be fully covered by the TRIPS agreement, and in favour of ideas becoming tradable commodities on a market in which small and medium-sized businesses will have no chance whatever to keep up, because the costs involved in developing patents and defending them in court are too great. It is not acceptable that every small or medium-sized business should be required to seek out a patent attorney to defend its own innovations.
If, though, you add your support to the broad support that already exists for the 21 amendments, you will be giving innovative and creative SMEs room to move, that is to say, the space and opportunity to develop. These 21 amendments represent our attempt at correcting the mistake made by the governments, who had obviously taken the wrong boat and had bowed to pressure from the industry.
Let us not harbour any illusions about the fact that industry wants full patentability for software, as a good source of additional income with which to fill up the cash till and, of course, as a way of driving small and medium-sized businesses, along with innovation, out of the marketplace. That much is quite clear from some of the advertisements placed in
and elsewhere by such companies as SAP and the like. Take a look at them, and you will realise just what the Council’s Common Position really adds up to.
The 21 amendments will enable us to have a free market, with companies competing in the market rather than in a court of law, and so I ask you to support these 21 amendments, which we urgently need if European innovation is to develop."@en1
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