Brussels, 07/10/2003 (Agence Europe) - Last Wednesday the Petitions Committee at the European Parliament declared that the two petitions on software patents were admissible. The first petition submitted by Eurolinux got together 280,000 signatures of which 6,000 came from SMEs and aims to promote so-called free software. The second is supported by 30 renown scientists such as Robin Milner from Cambridge University, who asked Parliament to ensure, "that it is impossible to patent ideas underlying software (algorithms), methods and processing information, data structures and software that is interactive between humans and people. As its promoter Philippe Aigrain an information technology researchers explained to the Petitions Committee, "in the vote at Parliament you met the expectations of most of the requests that we had made". He explained that they wanted to draw attention to the dangers with the follow-up to the legislative process, "the amendments that you adopted were independent. Withdraw just one of them and everything would be lost. Allow the technical definition, which is potentially patentable and 100,000 software patents will be swallowed up by it. Allow the amendment for technical characteristics to be used for deciding if there is technical innovation and the Patents Office will consider just about everything as technical. Allow the reintroduction of software or programme claims and what ever the safeguards are in place, all developers, distributors, software publishers will become victims of a tide of litigation claims". Although these petitions were declared admissible, they cannot be followed up. The Petitions Committee has sent them to the legal committee but for information alone, with the belief that the draft directive as amended by MEPs during the last plenary (EUROPE 25 September p 11), would meet the petitioners requests.