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Software Patents in Europe
Current status
The future of software patents in Europe is uncertain. The Software Patent Directive was rejected by the European Parliament on the 6th of July 2005, after seven years of campaigning by people in FSFE and other organisations - most notably, one of our associate organisations, FFII. This was a monumental victory and displays the legislative competence of the Free Software community. However, the struggle is not over. Information about the current status of software patents in the EU can be found in this November 2007 blog entry: Do software patents exist in the EU?
The software patent issue is likely to return via initiatives such as the Community Patent or the European Patent Litigation Agreement (EPLA). The details of how these initiatives could introduce software patents are described in this August 2006 blog entry: The Future of the Patents Battle. FSFE continues to work on this.
Selected FSFE actions
2007-present: IPRED2 - The Criminalisation Directive
A proposal has been made by the European Commission to criminalise and increase the penalties and invasive investigative measures for patents, copyrights, trademarks, and all other laws lumped together by the term "Intellectual Property". It looks like patents will now be excluded from this directive, but the legislative process is still ongoing and there are many other harmful aspects of this directive that must be corrected.
2006-2007: Version 3 of the GNU GPL
During the 18 month public consultation for the drafting of GPLv3, FSFE worked to assist community participation. Among other benefits, GPLv3 offers better protection for free software developers against patent litigation. Our licences can only solve a small part of the harm of software patents, but they can make free software development easy in some ways.
2006-July-12th: Participation in EC hearing
Ciaran O'Riordan represented and made a statement on behalf of FSFE at this hearing organised by the European Commission on the future of the patent system.
2006-March-31st: Response submitted to EC patent questionnaire
FSFE has submitted its response to the European Commission's questionnaire titled "On the patent system in Europe".
2005-July-6th: Software Patent Directive Dropped
After years of struggle, the European Parliament finally rejected the software patent directive with 648 of 680 votes.
2005-July-1st: Bullet Points on the Second Reading
One week before the second reading vote by the European Parliament, FSFE sent a simplified explanation of the core areas of confusion. This was delivered in six languages which were produced on short notice by the FSFE Translation Team.
2005-June-28th: Karlsruhe Memorandum
The Free Software Foundation Europe has published, on June 28th 2005, the Karlsruhe Memorandum against software patents. This memorandum collected more than 200 signatures at this year's GNU/LinuxTag conference in Karlsruhe. Citing scientific evidence, the text argues that software patents in Europe will hurt jobs and innovation. Among the supporters are leaders of some of Europe's biggest trade union groups. All MEPs received a copy of this.
About the problem
The Free Software Foundation Europe is actively working against the introduction of software patents in Europe. Software patents create the following problems.
- Add legal risks, and therefore costs, to software development
- Specifically inhibit the development of useful software by blocking compatibility and interoperability
- Patents are incompatible with software because software is so complex - too many ideas are used for it to be practical to count them and check them against existing patents
To understand how patents work, it is important to realise that they have almost nothing in common with copyright. While Copyright is granted on the the work of an author, such as a computer program, patents are granted on ideas that could be used inside a computer program. So when thinking of Patents, think of "symphony combining wind and string instruments" and not "Beethoven's 2nd symphony."
For background information about patents, software patents, and the difference between patents and copyright please read our background page.
Further reading
- To see the sequence of events before the directive was rejected, read our previous current status webpage.
- We also encourage you to read more about software patents in our further reading section.
- The campaign against software patentability in Europe is lead by Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure. For the most up-to-date information, see their Software Patent News wiki.
- List of transcripts of software patents presentations, such as Richard Stallman's 2004 talk: The Dangers of Software Patents
- A review of the EU legislative proposals and reasonings, written after the rejection of the EU software patents directive.