Marco Schulze comments on the "software patent of August"

"Nutzwerk's patent DE10048113 demonstrates how the EPO's (and many national patent offices') inflationary patenting practice allows to obtain a broad monopoly without innovation. All of us - the developers as well as the users - can really be glad that these monopolies are not enforceable in Europe. The current law explicitely excludes software from patentibility and the national courts have not forgotten that exclusion - in contrast to the EPO.

This patent does, however, not only prove that our patent offices ignore current law already for years, but it also shows that they do not even know the state of the art: In 2000, when the software patent of August was registered, this 'innovation' was old hat: Programs like sendmail, procmail, ipfw, IPFilter and many more implement at least one of the patent's claims and existed already years (some even decades) before the patent registration.

Current law equates software with literature and thus protects it by means of copyrights. Like in the case normal literature, the ideas are cheap in software development, while nearly all effort is invested into the actual work. That means, software patents protect cheap ideas while they invalidate the real labour by undermining the author's rights: The patent of the month consists out of 12 pages text, whose only value is the skillful legal formulation. The program IPFilter on the other hand consists out of 150 thousand lines of source code (equivalent to about 6 novels with each 625 pages).

If software patents became enforceable in Europe, we would be flooded by many thousands of these broad monopolies and a medium-sized company could not bring any software to market anymore."

patentfrei.de is an initiative of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). It was founded in 2004 in Germany to bcome involved against the highly controversial software patent directive, which in fact was rejected by the European Parliament. More than 600 entrepreneurs, founders and CEOs of SMEs signed patentfrei.de's "Collective Statement" . In the spirit of this statement, patentfrei.de continues to represent the interests of SMEs. Their biggest concern is not the protection *through* patents, but the protection *against* patents.