According to the Financial Times, the JURI-approved text of the draft Directive remains similar to that recently approved by the Council of Ministers – a fact that has infuriated opponents of the draft.
Eva Lichtenberger and Monica Frassoni, of the Greens / European Free Alliance, said the vote "opens the doors for the software market's dinosaurs."
According to their joint statement:
"Though all political groups claim that they want to exclude 'pure' software patents from the directive, the pro-big business majority in the committee succeeded in creating dangerous loopholes. A definition of the difference between software and technique, for example, says that software can be considered to be the novel feature in an invention, and thus is patentable."
Their fear – shared by many – is that Europe gets a liberal regime of patentability, similar to that of the US.
The European Parliament is in the process of reconsidering the draft Directive. First time round, the Parliament extensively altered the draft text. But its amendments were rejected by the Council of Ministers in March, after a 10-month delay and intensive lobbying by groups on both sides of the debate.
The draft was therefore returned to the Parliament for a second reading, for which the Parliamentary rapporteur, former French Prime Minister Michel Rocard, has put forward a total of 256 amendments.
These amendments seek to restrict the scope of the draft by forbidding the grant of patents for “the treatment, the manipulation, the representation and the presentation of information through software”.
Patents should only be granted for software that controlled a physical process or a “controllable force of nature,” according to Rocard.
The Financial Times reports that, in a series of tight votes, JURI members yesterday rejected most of Rocard's proposals.
“European industry is satisfied with the outcome of today's vote,” Mark MacGann, President of technology trade group EICTA told the FT. “We will now urge the entire parliament to follow suit. It is a pretty good result.”
Jonas Maebe from anti-software patents group the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, commented:
"Formally, nothing is lost. All amendments rejected in JURI can be tabled again for plenary (or different amendments), and those adopted now still have to be adopted again in plenary as well. In practice, this is a slap in the face of millions of European SMEs, consumers and hundreds of thousands of European citizens.”
The draft now goes forward to a full Parliamentary vote, expected around 6th July. While the opinion of the legal affairs committee is influential, MEPs are not obliged to follow it.