“20,000 citizens, including 300 corporate executives, have
signed so far the EuroLinux Petition for a Software Patent Free
Europe after one month. The EuroLinux Petition was launched on 15th
May 2000 to protect software innovation in Europe and oppose
current plans of the European Commission to legalise software
patents in Europe.”
“The current 20,000 individual signatures mainly consist of
individual IT professionals, including 300 corporate
executives (CEO, CTO, CFO, etc.), about 50 companies and
more than 20 non-profit associations. Quite interestingly,
many employees from large corporations such as IBM, Siemens or
Alcatel took the risk of signing the Eurolinux petition and express
their strong opposition to the active pressures which are being put
on the European Commission by their legal department in favour of a
broad software patent system in Europe. EuroLinux takes this as an
evidence that patent attorneys working for large corporations may
not always understand the economic interest of their employer, but
certainly do understand their own.”
“Philip Sargent, CEO of Metaweb, a Cambridge-based web-database
development company at the heart of Silicon Fen, says: “we have
seen the obvious and anti-competitive effect that software patents
have had on the US software industry and we must not let it happen
here. Despite the logical arguments in favour of software patents,
the side-effects are demonstrably more important and far-reaching.
There is definite and wide-spread hard evidence to support the case
that software patent portfolios are mostly used as bargaining
counters in takeover negotitations and in bludgeoning smaller
companies without large legal staffs. The role of patents in
helping to reward investment in developing new technology is
unproven; even though that is their primary purpose in non-software
industries. The difference is one of pace: a key new software idea
is protected not by legal defence, but by investing in it and
making it work. Increasingly we are seeing that most new key ideas,
e.g. the web, HTML, Linux etc. are provided free of patent
restrictions and that this is both profitable and
public-spirited.”