Thank you, European Parliament!
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9th July 2009 (drafted by phm) -- The European Parliament has done what it could to reject attempts of the European Patent Office and its allies to impose software patentability on Europe. It has proven that, unlike the Commission and Council, it is willing to listen to citizens and industry and able to discern genuine from fake interests. Attempts of 20 companies with big patent departments and big lobbying budgets to create an appearance of grassroots support for software patents have failed before the discerning eyes of a majority of members of the European Parliament.
By providing expertise based on solid factual evidence and on the interests of the economic majority as well as the public at large, the FFII has been able to win the trust of more than half of the members of Parliament, including well-resepected leading figures in all groups, including Michel Rocard, Zuzana Roithová, Jerzy Buzek, Eva Lichtenberger, Gilles Savary, Piia-Noora Kauppi, Othmar Karas, John Purvis, Andrew Duff, Thomas Ulmer, Karl von Wogau, Janusz Onyszkiewicz, Adam Gierek, Anders Wijkman, just to name a few. We will continue to look for ways to express our gratitude, possibly through a party in Brussels in September and a website http://www.power-to-the-parliament.org/ which will invite more people to celebrate.
Together with members of the European Parliament in all party groups, we were able to win support for 21 cross-party compromise amendments, on which future solutions to the persisting problems can be based. The problems persist, because the Council and Commission still seem to be firmly in the hands of the patent establishment.
We have won a defensive battle, but the European Patent Office continues to insist on the unlawful patenting practise to which the European Parliament has said a clear No. There will without doubt be further attempts by the European patent establishment to impose this practise on national courts via EU law, or even simply by institution of a EU patent court or a Community Patent. It must be clear that such institutions must not be created before the problems of the EPO are solved. During the next years and months we will continue to need support from all political players in building up pressure to solve these problems. We now have nearly 2000 companies signed up as Economic Majority supporters, but we must reach a hundred times this amount, and we must knit these supporters into a close network with much greater organisational capability than before.
Small and medium enterprises are the powerhouse of innovation and employment in Europe's information economy. The continued patent threat will hopefully have one positive effect: It will make the Economic Majority aware of its political responsibilities. It is this majority of players that must find answers to a large range of problems connected to the EU's goals of "becoming the most competitive knowledge economy".
Therefore we are maintaining our presence in Brussels and trying to learn more about a wider range of policy issues. Among other plans, we are preparing our next conference in November 2005.
We also are indebted to national Parliaments, particularly those of the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Spain for their often futile attempts at controlling the behaviour of their countries' representatives in the Council, and for their intervention in favour of the European Parliament during its second reading. The experience has clearly shown that parliaments are able to represent citizens and that the usurption of legislative power by ministerial bureaucrats at the expense of parliaments is a grave danger to democracy in Europe which we will have to work hard to overcome in the coming years.
While the EU is no longer working on the problems of patentability, it may become necessary to send some signals to national courts through national parliaments, which encourage these courts to adhere to the written law and to reject the doctrines of the European Patent Office, just as the Europe's democratically legitimated legislators have done.
