Karlsruhe Memorandum on Softwarepatentability needs your signature!
Georg Greve, president of Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) asks "everyone to sign up to the Karlsruhe Memorandum on software patentability [1]: preserve your freedom to be creative!" Started last Saturday during GNU/Linuxtag in Karlsruhe, Germany the memorandum was signed by more than 200 people and 26 companies - among them Katja Husen, from the federal board of the German Green Party, Christa Dahme, federal board member of the German Confederation of Trade Unions (DGB), Dr. Wolfgang Kowalsky, European Trade Union Confederation (ETUC) and Annette Mühlberg, Head of eGovernment, ver.di - United Services Union-Headquarters, Berlin.
FSFE's goal: urge MEPs to once more make the necessary amendments to turn the European software patent directive "into a directive that allows patents on computer-aided inventions, but clearly prevents software patenting."
As the memorandum highlights, patents on software are among the worst threats to knowledge-based economies, because they "make computers less secure, less reliable and prevent competition on a basic level. Lack of competition and uncalculable legal risks raise the cost of ICT and cost jobs wherever the economy depends upon them."
According to the Free Software Foundation Europe "the most essential discoveries in the field of ICT were successful because they were not patented, for instance the invention of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee. If software patents are enacted, the world will never know which discovery could have been the next World Wide Web."
The European "centre of expertise for Free Software" cites a number of international scientific studies supporting its arguments: the German Monopolkommission, [2] which regularly reports about dangers to competition to the Federal Government of Germany; the Massachussetts Institute of Technology (MIT) [3]; the Boston University School of Law [4]; Deutsche Bank Research [5]; Price Waterhouse Coopers [6]; and the US Federal Trade Commission [7].
1 http://fsfeurope.org/projects/swpat/memorandum.en.html 2 http://swpat.ffii.org/archiv/zitate/index.de.html#mopoko0207 3 http://www.researchoninnovation.org/patent.pdf 4 http://www.researchoninnovation.org/swpat.pdf 5 http://www.dbresearch.com/PROD/DBR_INTERNET_EN-PROD/PROD0000000000175949.pdf 6 http://www.pwc.com/Extweb/pwcpublications.nsf/docid/EC6DE73A846581CE80256EFD... 7 http://www.ftc.gov/os/2003/10/innovationrpt.pdf