Brussels, 24/09/2003 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday, the European Parliament approved at first reading the draft directive on the "patentability of computer-aided inventions", voting 364 votes in favour, 152 against and 33 abstentions. It refused to purely and simply reject the highly controversial draft text, as requested by the Greens Group, the United Left, the Union for a Europe of Nations and Europe of Democracies and Diversities.
While around one hundred demonstrators marched in front of the Parliament in Strasbourg calling for the directive to be rejected, the rapporteur, British Labour member Arlene McCarthy stressed that, in ten years in Parliament, she had never been faced with such a campaign of aggressive harassment on the part of the lobbyists, to the point of causing one of her assistants to have a nervous breakdown.
Approving the rapporteur, MEPs gave a definition of the inventions that may be patented, pointing out that the invention should make a "technical contribution", explicitly ruling out "methods intended for the exercise of economic activities, and mathematical methods". This specification was adopted by 310 to 222 and 3 abstentions. Also, it is specified that the manipulation, the treatment, the distribution and the publication of information, in whatever form, cannot be considered counterfeiting. In other terms, commercial methods and algorithms, protected by US law on patents, are excluded. The terms "invention" and "technical" are themselves specified.
MEPs adopted an amendment stipulating that it is not counterfeiting to use a patented technique to ensure interoperability of systems. According to the wording that Commissioner Frits Bolkestein found acceptable, the Member States are invited to ensure that the use of a patented technique to ensure the conversion of conventions used in two different systems or IT networks, in order to allow the communication and exchange of data between them, is not considered as counterfeiting of a patent, on condition that it is not clearly incompatible with normal exploitation of the patent".
Restricting the scope of patentability still further, MEPs made clear that solutions to technical problems should not be considered as inventions that can be patented simply because they improve the effectiveness of the use of resources in the data processing system". This amendment, adopted by 318 votes to 219 and 5 abstentions, reflects German jurisprudence and excludes innovations allowing, for example, for speed to be increased or storage space to be reduced.
MEPs recognised in their amendment that the patent must give economic monopoly, but that innovation and competition should not be blocked. They stipulated that the Member States should ensure that the conditions for granting licenses should not be restrictive and that publication of the description of patented technique should include implementation of reference, which is operational and well-documented.
The Parliament rejected, however, the amendments by the GUE, EDD and UEN, which would have replaced the expression "patentability of computer-aided inventions" - which is not used, they say, by IT professionals- by the "limits of patentability for computerised data processing and application domains" (by 354 votes against, 169 in favour and 8 abstentions).
The Liberal Group welcomed the adoption of the report, which harmonises the current practices of the European Patents Office, allowing patentability within "strict limits". The Greens, on the other hand, stated their opposition to the text of the directive, considering, according to the terms of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, that it is used by the Commission as a "Trojan Horse" for introducing the software patent. Marie Anne Isler Béguin denied for his part that the "patents will kill innovation" while software must continue to be protected by the copyright system.
The association representing 44 multinationals of the sector (including Microsoft), the EICTA, protested against the Parliament's amendments which restrict the scope of patentable inventions (Articles 5 and 6 of the directive). "We are only asking for the directive to confirm the status quo in Europe, allowing inventors to continue to patent their computer-aided inventions", the EICTA President said in a press release. He feels that the amendment preventing the patentability of simple performance enhancers is the reflection of the German doctrine used in the thirties and abandoned for a long while now.