The European Parliament voted unanimously in favor of requesting a restart for the directive on the patentability of computer-implemented interventions last month, but the Commission has declined that request, and it could now be formally adopted by the European Council of Ministers within a week.
In a letter to European Parliament president Borrell Fontelles, European Commission president Jose Manuel Barroso wrote: At this stage in the co-decision procedure, and having supported the political agreement reached in the Council on 18 May 2004, the Commission does not intend to refer a new proposal to Parliament and Council.
He continued: Indeed the Commission is expecting the Council to formalize the political agreement as a common position as soon as possible, so that discussion may continue during the next phase of the co-decision procedure.
The directive is designed to standardize technology patent laws across the European Union, but contains a loophole that, according to critics, would allow widespread software patents. One of those critics, the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, FFII, warned that the Commission’s rejection could lead to the directive being abandoned completely.
The Commission is alienating the European Parliament to an extent that it may very well simply call a halt to this farce, which is supposed to represent democracy, warned Jonas Maebe, FFII board member.
Meanwhile, NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign leader, Florian Mueller, has called on the Council of Ministers to reopen negotiations on its common position at the forthcoming meeting of the Competitiveness Council on March 7 so that changing attitudes to the directive can be taken into account.
As well as within the European Parliament, which contains directly elected members, opposition to the directive has also been growing among member states, whose governments are represented by the Council of Ministers.
In February, the German Bundestag, the Senado upper house of the Spanish parliament, and the Dutch Tweede Kramer, voted for resolutions against the proposed directive. The Polish government has twice previously delayed the approval of the directive by the Council of Ministers by arguing that more time is needed to discuss the implications of its wording.
