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20,000
citizens and 50 companies call for a EuroLinux Alliance
For immediate Release Cambridge, London, Metz, Munich & Paris, 20/7/2000 - 20,000 citizens, including 300 corporate executives, have signed so far the EuroLinux Petition for a Software Patent Free Europe after one month. The EuroLinux Petition was launched on 15/6/2000 to protect software innovation in Europe against current plans of the European Commission to legalise software patents in Europe. The current 20,000 individual signatures mainly consist of individual IT professionals, including 300 corporate executives (CEO, CTO, CFO, etc.), about 50 companies and more than 20 non-profit associations. Quite interestingly, many employees from large corporations such as IBM, Siemens or Alcatel took the risk of signing the Eurolinux petition and express their strong opposition to the active pressures which are being put on the European Commission by their legal department in favour of a broad software patent system in Europe. EuroLinux takes this as an evidence that patent attorneys working for large corporations may not always understand the economic interest of their employer, but certainly do understand their own. Many of the sponsors of this petition gave explanatory statements for their support. Here are some examples. “We have seen the obvious and anti-competitive effect that software patents have had on the US software industry and we must not let it happen here.”, says Philip Sargent, CEO of Metaweb, a Cambridge-based web-database development company, “Despite the logical arguments in favour of software patents, the side effects are demonstrably more important and far-reaching. There is definite and wide-spread hard evidence to support the case that software patent portfolios are mostly used as bargaining counters in takeover negotiations and in bludgeoning smaller companies without large legal staffs. The role of patents in helping to reward investment in developing new technology is unproven; even though that is their primary purpose in non-software industries. The difference is one of pace: a key new software idea is protected not by legal defence, but by investing in it and making it work. Increasingly we are seeing that most new key ideas, e.g. the Web, HTML, Linux etc. are provided free of patent restrictions and that this is both profitable and public-spirited.” Klaus Weidner of WMP GmbH adds “Patents are supposed to promote invention and progress, but software patents would have the opposite effect. Interoperability between programs requires either open standards or reverse-engineering of protocols or file formats. If this would be prohibited by software patents, companies with a large market share would be able to stifle competition. In most cases, this would mean that large U.S. companies would dominate the European market, and any startup companies would be legally prevented from competing with them. This would have disastrous results for the long term competitiveness of the European IT sector.” “As technical director of a high-tech company involved is the design of computer software, I am extremely concerned with the current situation of patent law with respect to software algorithms in the European Union which has been brought to my attention by the EuroLinux petition.” continues James Carrier, Technical Director of BulletOnline, “I believe that the extension of patent law to cover software in any way, shape or form can only damage commerce and stifle competition and innovation throughout the EU, and I urge the Commission to act quickly to ensure that the current law - which clearly prohibits such patents - is enforced, rather than replaced with further, potentially damaging, legislation”. Jürgen Siepman, attorney and legal adviser of Linux-Verband e.V., a German association which represents numerous Linux companies and professionals concludes: “Software patents are more than ever on the European Commission agenda. Most decisions on this matter in Europe are currently taken under pressure, without studying their economic impact or even considering the democratic opinion. Under the pressure of patent professionals, the European Patent Office invented its own rules in order to grant more than 10,000 software related patents, more than 75% of which were filed by non-European companies. However, most of these patents can not be enforced currently because they were granted in contradiction with the written Law. Under diplomatic pressures, the general directorate for internal market at the European Commission, is now suggesting to include the self-invented practices of the European Patent Office into the European written Law. This is very clever because it allows them to completely change the Law without any open debate and pretend they did not do anything. And guess what? The person in charge of software patents at the European Commission comes from the European Patent Office!” FiguresNumber of individual signatures in large corporations Siemens (54), MandrakeSoft SA (42), IBM (42), SuSE AG (41), Cap Gemini Ernst & Young (32), Alcatel (29), Ericsson (28), ID-PRO GmbH (25), Atos (22), Nokia (22), France Telecom / Wanadoo (21), Oracle (13), SNCF (13), Alcôve (12), EDF (12), Belgacom / Skynet (11), SAP (10), Deutsche Telekom / T-Online (10). Number of individual signatures per country Germany (5292), France (4888), Denmark (1573), Sweden (1030), United Kingdom (876), Austria (654), Belgium (606), Italy (502), Netherlands (495), Spain (469), Finland (375), Switzerland (334), Czechia (298). ReferencesThe EuroLinux Petition for a Software Patent Free Europe -
http://petition.eurolinux.org MetaWeb - http://www.metaweb.net About EuroLinux - www.eurolinux.orgThe 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 Open Standards, Open Competition, Linux and Open Source Software. Companies members or supporters of EuroLinux develop or sell software under free, semi-free and non-free licenses for operating systems such as Linux, MacOS or Windows. The EuroLinux Alliance has co-organised in 1999, together with the French Embassy in Japan, the first Europe-Japan conference on Linux and Free Software. The EuroLinux Alliance is at the initiative of the www.freepatents.org web site to promote and protect innovation and competition in the European IT industry. Press Contacts France & Europe: Stéfane Fermigier sf@fermigier.com +33-6 63 04 12
77 Permanent URL for this PR http://petition.eurolinux.org/pr/pr4.html LegaleseLinux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. |
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