From phm@xxx.xxx Thu Jun 10 08:37:41 1999
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 <phm@xxx.xxx
Subject: lobbying for Lojban at the European Patent Office

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.