Poles push patents off EU agenda

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Good for them

I think this story isn't quite correct.

It was agreed at a meeting of council ministers earlier in the year. However it became clear that the Dutch minister had fibbed to his parliament about a ficticious compromise with the EU parliament and that others had been pushed into agreeing. It also became clear he would ignore his parliament's later instructions and vote it through anyway.

It could have gone through on a vote without further discussion provided nobody objected. They then slotted it into this fisheries meeting hoping nobody would notice. But it was noticed. Perhaps they'll try again on another unrelated bill.

(This being modern democracy at work, where lies and clandestine meetings are the norm and open discussion is avoided).

Poland (or anyone) had the right to kick it off the vote and put it back into the proper forum for discussion. Which to their credit they did.

I wish Microsoft Nokia, IBM and the other BSA members would go away and rethink and come back with something less tricky that could be accepted as a compromise.

The wording the parliament put in to restrict patents to *predominantly* technical inventions was a good thing. Every one of them has been attacked with fluffly non-technical patents.

The block on pure data processing patents will also remove patenting of pure maths algorithms, which are really discoveries not inventions anyway. That was good too.

They also didn't block software as an aspect of an invention, so even most of Microsoft's stuff could still be patented where it does something other than pure dataprocessing, and Nokia's handset technology certainly could be.

So why all the cloak and dagger stuff?

Posted by: Nigel Johnstone   Posted on: 12/21/04 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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