X-Digest-Num: 163 Message-ID: <44114.163.958.959273824@eGroups.com> Date: Thu, 10 Jun 1999 17:37:41 +0200 (CEST) From: PILCH Hartmut Subject: lobbying for Lojban at the European Patent Office X-Yahoo-Message-Num: 958 Content-Length: 1925 Lines: 49 Sorry, my prior submission was full of anacolouths. Here it is again ------------- I am currently very actively lobbying the EU patent organisations because of the imminent danger of patentability of programming concepts (so called "software patents"). The EU commission and the Administrative Council of European Patent Organisations are trying to pave the way for this by modifying the European Patent Convention (EPC). A working group for this is to be nominated on June 24/25 at a conference in Paris. A multilingual public petition letter at http://swpat.ffii.org/miert/ has already been signed by about 800 people. I have, as part of my lobby work, proposed the introduction of Lojban as an auxiliary language for patent descriptions. People at the EPO I spoke to were quite interested. The EU is planning measures to make life easier for their customers, i.e. mainly big corporations who own a lot of patents. My lobbying goals are: 1 no change to the Munich convention, i.e. no patentability of non-industrial concepts such as software solutions 2 cut examination and research costs by putting all data in the internet under an Open Content license and thus opening a free market for independent patent research specialists 3 no cuts of translation costs, but, where acceptable to the EPC countries, allow a submission of a text in a logical language, which can be automatically translated to, for example. Logician's Portuguese. So far, the planned lobbying organisation EuroLinux (other names still possible, see http://eurolinux.ffii.org) has only no 1 on the agenda and no 2 is fairly easy to get on. No 3 is a burden to our lobbying efforts, unless we get some active participation of Lojbanists in our lobby group. What do you think? -phm P.S. one first step might be to lojbanize the letter to Van Miert, of which an Esperanto version is already on the net.