Letter to MP Regarding UK/EU Software Patents

Software patents. I don’t want them. I don’t think my employer will want them. The EU is pushing a directive permitting software patents. Believing myself to be in the EU (which currently does not permit software patents), and believing the UK to have adopted the same patentability laws as the EU, I faxed my MP.

Dear Mr Keith Bradley,

Reading today’s IT news I happened upon an article of the greatest concern: that changes to legislation are being pushed through the last European Council meetings before Christmas which would pave the way for software patents.

I work at Wythenshawe Hospital managing a small software development team. My team have produced software which, among other things, aims to improve patient care by monitoring the training of our staff (part of an award called ‘Clinical Negligence Scheme for Trusts, Level 2’). We have limited resources but deliver software systems with massive benefits.

I fear, should software patents become part of EU legislation, that hospitals with small software development teams like my own will be forced to abandon their specialist software development and disband their development teams. The reason would be that developing any new IT system here would require costly patent searches and, potentially, large licensing fees for software we have developed on our own. Worse could come to pass if a search failed to alert us to an existing patent (easily done in a highly specialist field such as developing clinical IT systems). The proposal to have a 20 year lifespan on software patents is absurd: imagine what computers were like 20 years ago and you’ll see that the field of IT has moved forward at an incredible pace. A software patent for 20 years would mean that the only technology freely available for use would be the most ancient!

This would stifle development of ‘expert systems’ like the ones my team develops and force the public sector to buy the much more expensive services of the private sector. This, of course, would be to the detriment of the patient and the tax payer.

I urge you to do what you can to make sure that software patents do not come to be part of EU legislation.

Regards,

Marek Isalski