Notes of the speech of Piia-Noora Kauppi 050202.
Recording of her speech: http://www.ffii.se/dokument/juri.ogg
Thank you Mr. Chairman.
It's very easy to agree, what you [1] say about the innovativeness of Europe and Lisbon goals, how important it is to get more R&D and so on. But it's equally important that this community of innovation is a community for all European innovators. It's not only for big business, it should be also for SMEs which are actually the ones feeding the innovativeness in Europe.
You you yourself started by saying that we should reach fair balance in this proposal. You said also that it's not an acceptable situation that the EPO is running wild, and they are making very, very far reaching interpretations of the conventions and making case law which runs out of hands of the legislators. This is not a good solution, I agree also on that point.
You have a Commission website, the Europa website with all the Commission proposals explained for ordinary citizens.
In that website, there is also a big story, a big article about this proposal for CII, and there is a heading about Parliament conflict:
Under that heading the *Commission* writes - and I quote directly from the Commission's website [2]:
"the council approach is much more favourable to software patents and thus *broadly* *in line* with the commissions initial proposal", which the parliament amended.
This explains why the Council Common Position of may 2004 did not retain *any* of the substantive amendments introduced by the EP.
*Is this a fair balance?*
We do not need new proposal from the commission. We already indicated our views - what we thought about the proposal of the Commission - in the first reading in September 2003.
We need a NEW Common Position!
Because this Common Position is not taking onboard any of the parliament concerns, and it was very broad majority in the parliament, and we are ready to do it again
in a second reading,
- in a new first reading,
- whatever.
We need a new Common Position!
[1] Commissioner McCreevy
