Open source lobby struggles in EU patent debate

Effort backfires

But the message from the conference floor was clear. "We don't want patent protection, thank you very much," said Robert Dewar, president of Ada Core Technologies, a small company based in New York with a division called ACT based in Paris, which sells programs and support mainly to defense companies such as Honeywell International.

"The way to win is to keep innovating, not relying on software patents," he said. Dewar has acted as an expert witness for defendants in numerous patent infringement lawsuits. "As a small firm, you go unnoticed by the big software makers until you create something really special.

"Then you start to receive letters from patent lawyers representing big firms that either want to buy a license to your software at a cheap price, or they simply want to drive you out of business so they can pick up your idea for next to nothing in the bankruptcy court after you have been sunk by astronomical legal fees," Dewar said.

"A patent suit is the one thing that could sink us," he added.

"If Europe adopts this software patent law I'm going to have to redirect millions of dollars I planned to invest in European software firms into a fund to cover patent infringement suits," said Laura Creighton, co-founder of Swedish groupware developer AB Strakt and of a British publishing software company called Reportlab.

Creighton became a millionaire during the Internet bubble and sold the bulk of her shares when prices were close to their peak in early 2000. She said she made her fortune mainly from E-Bay stock at a time when she herself was a software engineer. She now describes herself as a small-scale venture capitalist.

"I am the sort of person the European Union is looking for to help develop the European software market. Lawmakers should realize that this proposed law is putting me off," she said.

Creighton, Dewar and free software guru Richard Stallman, who also took part in the conference, all argue that the European lawmakers who aim to create a law that is more restrictive than the regime in the U.S. are misguided.

If the directive is passed, "there will be the same surge in patent applications in Europe that occurred in the U.S. in the late 1980s," Creighton said, pointing out that there are 30,000 patent applications already waiting to be legalized in Europe, including one for the ubiquitous progress bar used to show how a software download is progressing.

"They may want something short of what the U.S. permits in terms of patentabilty, but the reality is that European patent law will drift down the same path," Creighton said.

Although she largely agrees with him, Creighton doesn't share Stallman's evangelical approach to the debate.

"We do need laws to make sure software developers get paid for their work, but patent law is the wrong way to do it because patent law only benefits the big developers," she said.

McCarthy said the legal affairs committee will meet on Monday to try to narrow the wide range of amendments being proposed by MEPs from both sides of the debate. Another meeting may be necessary on May 20, ahead of a planned committee-level vote on May 21 and the Parliament-wide vote in early June, she said.

The proposal for a law was drafted by the European Commission, the executive body of the Union, early last year. It would allow patents only for software applications of a technical nature, and it would not permit patents on business methods.