La società KOAN di Bergamo ha annunciato di aver sottoscritto la petizione per fermare i brevetti software in Europa indetta dalla Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure e.V. di Berlino. Molte altre aziende operanti nel settore del software libero hanno sottoscritto l’iniziativa. Di seguito pubblichiamo il testo integrale della lettera.
Our company is worried about the current plans to set up a unitary patent with a flanking unified patent court. The European Patent Office (EPO)'s practices to grant software patents, under the deceiving term of “computer-implemented inventions”, pose a threat to our professional activities. We are concerned that the regulation on the unitary patent, as agreed in December 2011 by the negotiators of the Council, the Commission, and the Committee on Legal Affairs of the European Parliament, leaves any and every issue on the limits of patentability to the EPO's case law, without any democratic control or review by an independent court. The regulation on the unitary patent is an opportunity for the EU legislators to harmonise substantive patent law in the EU institutional and jurisdictional framework, and to put an end to the EPO's self-motivated practices extending the realm of patentability to software. Failing to do so, this unitary patent will do more harm than good to the EU ICT firms. For these reasons, we urge legislators to adopt amendments which clearly state that the EPO's decisions are subject to a review from the Court of Justice of the European Union, and which reaffirm the rejection of software patentability, as expressed by the vote of the European Parliament on September 24th, 2003 and July 6th, 2005. Best regards -- Marco Cavallini - CEO, KOAN sas - Bergamo, Italy