European Software-Patents Initiative Flipped Upside Down

Just hours after Bill Gates met with members of the EU Parliament (MEPs) in Brussels, they delivered a stinging rebuke, Wednesday night, to Microsoft's European software-patent policy. Parliament's Legal Affairs Committee voted to restart the legislative process on patents.

The earlier patent policy could have introduced widespread patenting of software in the EU--a policy favored by Microsoft and other large companies with large software-patent portfolios. The MEPs' action means the whole issue of software patents will be restarted in a process that could take years to resolve.

"This works in our favor," said Florian Mueller, who spearheaded the effort to restart the patents process. "Small and medium-sized software companies wrote their MEPs. Now we can mobilize more companies to join our campaign." Mueller, who is campaign manager of the NoSoftwarePatents.com organization, said the group will move from a defensive stance--it opposed the older patent policy--to an offensive posture, in which it will seek to gather support for its position on patents.

Bill Gates met with Parliament MEPs Tuesday, and media reports said he didn't raise the patents issue, and he ducked discussing the subject when an MEP queried him about it. However, Microsoft's lobbyists in Brussels had been campaigning for the older patent proposal that was sidetracked by the MEPs after the meeting with Gates. The Microsoft chief has been on a good will tour of Europe, attending the World Economic Forum in Switzerland, visiting Microsoft's main European headquarters in Bavaria, and going to Prague, where Microsoft is sponsoring a meeting with representatives of governments.

The MEPs' action means that the EU will be asked to rewrite Europe's Computer Implemented Inventions Directive. Patents are extremely complex in Europe to begin with--many individual companies have their own patent systems--and many patents in Europe don't coincide with U.S. patents.

"Now this will be a marathon and not a sprint," said Mueller, whose organization is supported by open-source companies Red Hat and MySQL AB. The third sponsor is 1&1, a large German ISP.

Media reports said that 19 MEPs had favored restarting the patent process, while two MEPs voted to continue the earlier process. One MEP abstained.

Mueller noted that many large companies, including Microsoft, Nokia, Ericsson, and Alcatel, had supported the earlier patent proposal. He noted that the first opposition to the proposal came from Poland and has begun to build slowly.