Preliminary Findings of the Consultation exclude FFII enterprises
Brussels, Belgium, 3th July 2006
The European Commission published on the 3th July 2006 the "preliminary findings" which should be used as a first basis for the public hearing on the 12th July.
Briefly, two major problems of methodology appear...
- The unintended SME panel constitued ad hoc by the European Commission (untransparent methodology)
- The "standard replies" or "pre-fabricated" answers made by FFII and relayed by a thousand of entreprises not taken into account in the analysis of the "preliminary findings" by the European Commission (obscur methodology)
2515 replies
- 1493 original "individual replies"
- "Out of those, 1493 were original individual replies, including the 664 replies from the SME Panel consultation tool explained below".
Where does this SME Panel come from? How it has been constitued?
- The European Commission said...
"In parallel, an identical consultation was launched with European SME's via a tool developed for that purpose by DG Enterprise. Specialists from the Euro Info Centres conducted the survey based on the consultation questionnaire and drew up local reports which were then compiled into national reports sent to the Commission on 14 June. In total, 664 SME's from 14 Member States and the two acceding countries, representing a wide array of industrial sectors, participated in the survey".
Calling the Brussels Euro Info Centre to get more explanations on this SME panel which the existence has only been knowning since the 3th July 2006...
This SME Panel would have been constitued the 24th April 2006, that is to say after the deadline of the public hearing (12th April 2006). This ad hoc SME Panel would have been discretely constitued by the European Commission to create an artificial representation of the SMEs and get legitimation at a grass roots level.
For the Brussels Euro Info Centre, the selected SMES would have been constitued through a patent attorney client entreprises databasis. They would have also been sent a specific questionary. That is to say, this SME panel might be interested into more patents and of course easily influenced by their patent attorney.
Searching on Euro Info centres website...
The targeted SMEs to constitue the panel are clearly biaised in favour of the patent system.
"The SMEs which are targeted with the questionnaire are:
- Current patent holders
- Those who hold a patentable invention but who, for a particular reason have not sought the patent
- SME`s who have been sued by patent holders for patent infringement
- Any other SME`s who have had to deal with the patent system"
With an artificially constitued SME panel clearly pro patents - incorporated into the analysis and canno't be dissociated from the "normal" SMEs - the results of the analysis canno't be objective.
As to the conclusion of the preliminary findings, there would two different kind of SMEs...
- The micro entreprises that are "anxious" of patent system probably because of their lack of competence to understand the advantages of the "patent system".
- The medium-sized entreprises that feel more "comfortable" with the idea of a patent system.
- 1022 "standard replies"
- The European Commission said...
"The remaining responses can be divided into groups of identical "pre-fabricated" position papers submitted by members or sympathizers of professionals (patent attorneys) or interest groups (open source)".
The "Open source & software developers community" is said to constitue 24% of the total replies. However, only one speaker - Pieter Hintjens, President of FFII, will represent these 24% at the public hearing on the 12 July 2006. The other speaker will speak mostly in favour of most (software) patents.
The public hearing on the future patent policy in Europe (Brussels, 12 July 2006)
Then, the 1022 standard replies or "pre-fabricated" position papers seem to have been excluded from the analysis and not taking into account.
"The IT SME's and professionals (a submission prepared by the FFII was endorsed by over a thousand respondents, counting corporate and individual software developers, other IT professionals and academics among them) [...]"
Indeed, they do not appear in the rest of the analysis as if they were not valuable because of their "standarded" nature" and though being a little less than the half of the total answer.
