Economists' Letter- economists expressing dismay at the economic reasoning in McCarthy's report and calling on MEPs to reject the CEC directive proposal. The PDF version has a more complete list of signatures.
- Economists' Letter PDF version
- PDF version, lists more signatories:
Paul A. David, Oxford Internet Institute and Stanford University
Giovanni Dosi, Scuola Sant'anna Superiore
Dominique Foray, IMRI Université Dauphine
Alfonso Gambardella, Scuola Sant'anna Superiore
Aldo Geuna, SPRU, University of Sussex
Bronwyn H. Hall, University of California, Berkeley and Scuola Sant'anna Superiore
Dietmar Harhoff, Ludwig-Maxmilians-Universität München
Peter Holmes, SEI, University of Sussex
Luc Soete, MERIT, University of Maastricht
W. Edward Steinmueller, SPRU, University of Sussex
- Critique of McCarthy's Rationale for the Proposed Directive
- critique on which the letter is based.
- Arlene McCarthy 2003/06/18: The Need for A Directive
- The text which sparked the economists' criticism: Arlene McCarthy's exposure of the aims of the directive.
Explanatory Statement by Arlene McCarthy. Slightly revised version of her draft report of February, without corrections but with additions, e.g. mention of a small company in an unemployment blackspot in Southwest England which benefitted from voice recognition related software patents.
- Economists 2003/08: Software Patent Directive based on Faulty Reasoning
- A group of economists who study patent questions criticise the rationale with which Arlene McCarthy MEP and the European Commission's Internal Market Directorate their proposals for a European Directive "on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions".
- mail:
- media at ffii org
- phone:
- Hartmut Pilch +49-89-18979927
More Contacts to be supplied upon request
The EuroLinux Alliance for a Free Information Infrastructure is an open coalition of commercial companies and non-profit associations united to promote and protect a vigourous European Software Culture based on copyright, open standards, open competition and open source software such as Linux. Corporate members or sponsors of EuroLinux develop or sell software under free, semi-free and non-free licenses for operating systems such as GNU/Linux, MacOS or MS Windows.
The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) is a non-profit association registered in Munich, which is dedicated to the spread of data processing literacy. FFII supports the development of public information goods based on copyright, free competition, open standards. More than 300 members, 700 companies and 50,000 supporters have entrusted the FFII to act as their voice in public policy questions in the area of exclusion rights (intellectual property) in data processing.
http://swpat.ffii.org/news/03/ekon0820/index.en.html
- Economists 2003/08: Software Patent Directive based on Faulty Reasoning
- A group of economists who study patent questions criticise the rationale with which Arlene McCarthy MEP and the European Commission's Internal Market Directorate their proposals for a European Directive "on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions".
- Software Patent Events Wednesday 2003/08/27 12.00-16.00
- letter to MEPs citing the economists' petition
- OCDE Paris 28-29/08/2003: Conférence sur les droits de propriété intellectuelle, l'innovation et le rendement économique
- Some of the economists are participating in this conference on thu-fri Aug 28-29
- 2003/05/07-08 BXL: Software Patents: From Legal Wordings to Economic Reality
- Some of the economists spoke at this conference
- Information Economy and Swpat Conference Paris 20020610-1
- Some of the economists spoke at this conference
- JURI votes for Fake Limits on Patentability
- The European Parliament's Committee for Legal Affairs and the Internal Market (JURI) voted on tuesday morning about a list of proposed amendments to the planned software patent directive. It was the third and last in a series of committee votes, whose results will be presented to the plenary in early september. The other two commissions (CULT, ITRE) had opted to more or less clearly exclude software patents. The JURI rapporteur Arlene McCarthy MEP (UK socialist) also claimed to be aiming for a "restrictive harmonisation of the status quo" and "exclusion of software as such, algorithms and business methods from patentability". Yet McCarthy presented a voting list to fellow MEPs which, upon closer look, turns ideas like "Amazon One-Click Shopping" into patentable inventions. McCarthy and her followers rejected all amendment proposals that try to define central terms such as "technical" or "invention", while supporting some proposals which reinforce the patentability of software, e.g. by making publication of software a direct patent infringment, by stating that "computer-implemented inventions by their very nature belong to a field of technology", or by inserting new economic rationales ("self-evident" need for Europeans to rely on "patent protection" in view of "the present trend for traditional manufacturing industry to shift their operations to low-cost economies outside the European Union") into the recitals. Most of McCarthy's proposals found a conservative-socialist 2/3 majority (20 of 30 MEPs), whereas most of the proposals from the other committees (CULT = Culture, ITRE = Industry) were rejected. Study reports commissioned by the Parliament and other EU institutions were disregarded or misquoted, as some of their authors point out (see below). A few socialists and conservatives voted together with Greens and Left in favor of real limits on patentability (such as the CULT opinion, based on traditional definitions, that "data processing is not a field of technology" and that technical invention is about "use of controllable forces of nature"), but they were overruled by the two largest blocks. Most MEPs simply followed the voting lists of their "patent experts", such as Arlene McCarthy (UK) for the Socialists (PSE) and shadow rapporteur Dr. Joachim Wuermeling (DE) for the Conservatives (EPP). Both McCarthy and Wuermeling have closely followed the advice of the directive proponents from the European Patent Office (EPO) and the European Commission's Industrial Property Unit (CEC-Indprop, represented by former UK Patent Office employee Anthony Howard) and declined all offers of dialog with software professionals and academia ever since they were nominated rapporteurs in May 2002.
- From AllVoice to AllPatent: Milking the Speech Recognition Business with Parliamentary Support
- Arlene McCarthy's favorite software SME, mentioned in her text and in various speeches in the European Parliament, apparently the model of future European software business as promoted by McCarthy's directive proposal.
Allvoice Computing PLC, originally a text-processor service company based in Devon, UK, has obtained two broad and trivial patents in US and UK on the logics of interfacing between speech recognition and word processing. Allvoice tried to sell this interface as a standalone software product, but was apparently more successful in extracting rents from producers of full-fledged speech recognition software, such as IBM and Lernout & Hauspie, by means of patent litigation. Meanwhile Allvoice's business seems to be focussing on patent enforcement. Allvoice's director John Mitchell has also become a patent-political activist and an archetype of a business model which british parliamentarians are promoting in UK and EU.
- 30 Wetenschappers 2003/05: Petitie tegen de Softwarepatentenrichtlijn
- 30 bekende computerwetenschappers bekritiseren het voorstel van de Europese Commissie om softwarepatenten in Europa te legaliseren zeer scherp.
- Aufruf zum Handeln
- The European Commission's proposal for the patentability of software innovations requires a clear response from the European Parliament, the member state governments and other political players. Here is what we think should be done.
- FFII: Software Patents in Europe
- For the last few years the European Patent Office (EPO) has, contrary to the letter and spirit of the existing law, granted more than 30000 patents on rules of organisation and calculation claimed in terms of general-purpose computing equipment, called "programs for computers" in the law of 1973 and "computer-implemented inventions" in EPO Newspeak since 2000. Europe's patent movement is pressing to legitimate this practise by writing a new law. Although the patent movement has lost major battles in November 2000 and September 2003, Europe's programmers and citizens are still facing considerable risks. Here you find the basic documentation, starting from the latest news and a short overview.
![[translatable text]](/img/icons.other/txt.png){kind=icon}
![[howto help]](/img/icons.other/questionmark.png){kind=icon}
![[printable version]](/img/icons.other/pdficon.png){kind=icon}
![[Addenda]](/img/icons.other/addenda.png){kind=icon}