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Les brevets sur les logiciels et leur danger pour le shareware
Sheet on the software patents
- What ?
- The European Commission wants to allow software patenting.
- Why ?
- To encourage the European software firms to innovate more by giving them a
monopoly over their inventions so that they can cover their research costs.
- To ratify more easily TRIPS international agreements.
- To legalize the European Patent Office's illegal practices.
- How ?
- Power transfer from national offices to the European Patent Office (EPO),
which is an independent organism of the EU.
- Abandon of all democratic control on the EPO's practices.
- Who ?
Lobbies that are behind this reform are:
- Industrial properties advisers and other jurists.
- European Patent Office (EPO).
- Multinational companies of the software market (IBM, Microsoft...).
- Against software patents
-
- Why ?
- A software is an immaterial good, its creation is only issued from the work of mind
such as mathematics.
- Prohibitive cost on deposit (38000 Euros) : barrier for innovative Small and
Medium Enterprises.
- Hedged examinations: EPO's budget comes from the number of patents.
Consequently, there is an incentive to accept a maximum of patents without taking
into account technological innovation criteria.
- Necessity for software authors to take on jurists' services to avoid any
patent violation : reactivity and time to market are strongly penalised.
- The average cost of a software patent lawsuit is 500 000 USD (Source: USPTO).
- By creating a new juridical risk, the software patents threaten the free protection
offered by the copyright.
- Software innovation cycle lasts 3 years when a patent lasts 20 years.
- The patent is a tax evasion tool.
- Who ?
- European software commercial firms.
- Software SMEs and Shareware authors.
- Logiciel Libre companies and programmers.
- Proposed solutions
- keep and promote the copyright.
- To put in place a sui generis right similar to utility models which
allow a short-term (3 to 5 years) protection and a flexible licence system for
protecting technological innovations.
- To apply a democratic control on the EPO and to reform its mode operantis in
order to avoid any further illegal drifts.
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