Patentability and Democracy in Europe
How can industrial property be subordinated to modern economic policy?
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The European Patent Office (EPO) is continuing to grant thousands of patents on “computer-implemented” algorithms and business methods every year, against the letter and spirit of the written law, and its supporters have been lobbying for decades to legitimate this practise and impose it on reticent national courts. |
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In July 2005, after several failed attempts to legalise software patents in Europe, the patent establishment changed its strategy. Instead of explicitely seeking to sanction the patentabilitty of software, they are now seeking to create a central European patent court, which would establish and enforce patentability rules in their favor, without any possibility of correction by competing courts or democratically elected legislators. From 1999 to 2005, this site has played a major role in the debate about software patents in Europe. It provided in-depth information about the history of related patent doctrines and about the intricacies of current legislative proposals. This information was key in allowing thousands of software developers to become semi-experts on patent policy in a short time and thereby exert an influence on public policy that, even though still depressingly small, was perhaps larger than the influence exerted by any other grassroots group in Brussels before or after 2005. After July 2005, the focus of discussions about the patent establishment’s latest initiatives moved to other sites because our site had become a heavy legacy and our attention was absorbed by software reconstruction and content migration issues. As many of these issues have been resolved, we are now gradually beginning to pick up speed again. Below are some useful entry points to the site, which is still divided between pages in the old and those in the new format.
This site can be edited by all members of the eupat workgroup. 1 Sites with Related Content
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