Thomas Wünsche
CEO of EMS-Thomas Wünsche

Our contribution has just been increased from EUR 500 to EUR 2500. Why? I considered, what alone research and analysis of a potential infringement on a software patent will cost us for a product that is already in the market. We should decide our contribution not based on what we want to give, but based on what it will cost us to have given not enough.

In our fields of activity, automatisation technology and automotive electronics, a substantial part of the development effort flows into the software. Approximately 80% of our developers are software developers, the innovation capability of our enterprise depends greatly on software. In this area copyright appropriately protects us against imitation. Competitors who try to circumvent copyright by reverse engineering or clean room implementation come far too late in quick markets such as ours.

What we need for our innovation capability are property rights with low administrative overhead, such as copyright. Patents on software only drive up the administrative costs, create additional legal insecurity and thus work diametrically against our innovation capacity. The risks arising from software patents have already caused us to reduce our training offers, in order to liberate capacities for restructuring aimed at risk reduction. We would however prefer to train people, rather than spend our time and energy on coping with software patents and risks resulting therefrom.

The directive proposal of the European Parliament of September 2003 does not suffice to assure that our innovation capacity will in the future not be hampered by patents, but it does prevent the worst excesses. Technical inventions such as the much-cited anti lock braking system are also patentable under the Parliament's version of the directive. However, the scope of protection would be limited to the use of forces of nature at the periphery of the data processing system. In contrast, if the draft of the Council of ministers goes through, almost any process becomes patentable, and the description of such a process in the form of a computer program becomes a patent infringement. That would plunge us into a situation like in the USA, where large corporations suffocate their smaller competitors with the sheer mass of a portfolio of largely trivial patents, and where productless rent seekers build their fortunes on patent litigation.