Swedish ministry of Justice staff clueless or malicious?
Voting recomendations [1] from Swedish ministry of Justice staff show either lack of basic knowledge in patent law or unwillingness to understand core amendments from the cross party compromise tabled by groups from all over the political spectrum.
The saying "never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence" is a good rule of thumb, but leaked documents from a meeting yesterday at the Swedish Permanent Representation in Brussels where swedish MEPs and assistants were invited to discuss the European Parliament's amendments to the Council's Software Patents Directive show either a lack of basic understanding of patent law, or an attempt to push a pro-software patent agenda with convoluted and unclear arguments.
The swedish MEPs have been lobbied by the swedish government staff as intensly as by the big industry associations. MEP Anders Wijkman highlighted the government lobbying on the EPP-hosted conference "Claiming Economic Majorities: the Software Patent Case" on 29 June [2]. The swedish government has repeatly made it very clear they support the Council's text.
The core amendments of the the cross-partisan package of 21 amendments are all unacceptable to the swedish staff. The reasons given are unclear and contradictory, and shows signs of wilful misinterpretation of the amendment's intentions.
When the EP defines "a "field of technology" is a field of applied natural science", the swedish staff argues "to make it more exact it would be better to talk about "applied natural science and engeneering science"." This position is a cousin to EICTA's, which says "exact science", and opens up the patent system for any innovation in any dicipline of "engineering".
All amendments that keeps the requirements for patentability separate (to amend the convoluted EPO doctrines), are accused of putting "the conditions into one another".
Any amendment that implies that data processing solutions (i.e. computer programs) must be excluded from patentability is rejected. Everywhere an amendment would imply this, the swedish staff insists on inserting "as such".
Clarifying amendments are accused of "hair splitting" while amendments that makes clear a computer program is data processing solution are treated like untouchable aliens. Even if the European parliament's definition of a computer is as close as you can get to the standard industry definition, it is not understood at all by the swedish staff. Over all, any implication that a computer program is a solution to a problem is met with haptophobia ("fear of contact").
Finally, any university course in Swedish patent law clearly teaches there are four requirements for patentability: "For the method to be patentable it must be 1) an invention 2) that is industrially applicable 3) that is new [...] 4) and meets the inventive step requirement" [3]. The staff still argues there are only three.
[1] http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/europarl0309/amends05/plen0507/sv/prv-assess.pdf
[2] http://www.economic-majority.com/konf050629/index.en.php
[3] http://www.juridicum.su.se/jurweb/utbildning/grundkurser/c3/svarsmall%20040606.pdf
