International Law

FFII Press Release

By Karl-Friedrich Lenz

on the referral of software patent questions to the Enlarged Board of Appeal at the European Patent Office here.

The press release says that the European Patent Office should not be allowed to “validate software patents” without input of the European Parliament.

I am not sure I agree with that view. Whatever the Enlarged Board of Appeal decides in answer to the questions raised will be only of internal value. If they decide that software patents are necessary to help European software producers pay more royalties to the Americans and Japanese or get shut down altogether by Microsoft (Tom Tom), more power to them. That has no binding force on anybody else, for example a court in one of the EU Member States. Therefore, there is no way that the EPO can “validate” software patents without new legislation.

On the other hand, the European Patent Office needs to decide somehow when people file for software patents. And asking the Enlarged Board to consider if “some decisions of the boards of appeal have given too restrictive an interpretation of the breadth of the exclusion” goes in the right direction (widening the exclusion).

Full post as published by Lenz Blog on March 18, 2009 (boomark / email).