European Parliament requests Patent Directive restart

The draft Directive, often called the Software Patents Directive, has been on the verge of approval by the Council of Ministers since last May, when European Trade Ministers rejected amendments made to the draft by the European Parliament.

But progress on the draft Directive has stalled, with political manoeuvring keeping the proposals off the Council agenda, where it was due to be included as an "A" item, being one that is voted through without discussion.

The motion, initiated by 61 MEPs in January, was approved by the Parliament's influential legal affairs committee (JURI) earlier this month.

JURI, and now the Conference of Presidents (the leaders of all the Parliament's political groups), want the Parliamentary President to tell the Commission that the current proposals need to be reviewed. If granted, the request would start the Parliamentary debate afresh.

The Commission is not bound to comply with the request, and may ask the Council of Ministers to vote on the proposals as they currently stand. If that happens, the draft will be returned to the Parliament for a second reading – which has a much shorter time scale for debate than that offered by a first reading.

"It is not certain that the Commission will comply with the request of the Parliament," said Hartmut Pilch, president of anti-patent group the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure, "nor that it will use the opportunity to draft a good text, even though the previous text of the Commission was so poorly written that in the end it didn't serve anybody's purpose, not even that of the patent lobby."