Apologies if this has already been forwarded to announce, but people may be interested to check this out.

----- Original Message ----- From: FFII/Eurolinux: Holger Blasum blasum@ffii.org Date: Fri, 7 Jun 2002 00:43:46 GMT To: corez23@linuxmail.org Subject: Eurolinux UK patent consultation alert

Hello Ricardo Campos

Recently you signed the European petition against software patents (http://petition.eurolinux.org/). Thanks for your support!

We would like to remind you that the UK Patent Office is asking for public comments on the European Commissions proposal for a directive on the "patentability of computer-implementable inventions". You can find some more background information at

http://www.linux.org.uk/ http://swpat.ffii.org/players/uk/

The specific questions that the UKPO asks are at

http://www.patent.gov.uk/patent/notices/misc/softpat.htm

However, in addition to these questions you may also wish to comment on whether you agree to the UKPO's interpretation of the first consultation round, whether you think the admission of patents on "software with a technical effect" will be useful etc.

Another hint: Only the last 3 pages of the 22-page Commission document at

http://europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/en/indprop/comp/com02-92en.pdf

are the actual proposal, for a more detailed critique see

http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/eubsa-swpat0202/

You may want to state whether you allow, encourage or forbid the UKPO from publishing your statement on their website.

You can send an additional copy to

petition@eurolinux.org

so as to have your statement published on the petition page. Moreover you can send your drafts to petition@eurolinux.org to ask for our comments.

The official deadline is today (07 June 2002, though if you send sth on the weekend it will also arrive by the next working day on Monday), nonetheless maybe keep it short and simple (e.g. citing examples where your company is affected).

I apologize this comes very short-termed; if you want to support Eurolinux to do these things (maybe from an UK viewpoint) more long-term in future you are welcome to write to petition@eurolinux.org or to me.

If you have any questions, feel free to contact us or to join the European software patents mailing list (http://www.aful.org/mailman/listinfo/patents/)

Also pls do not hesitate to send any critique or comments to petition@eurolinux.org (there will be a confirmation message which hopefully won't deter you).

If you like surveys ;-), please tick

[ ] I have already written to the UKPO [ ] I will write to the UKPO [ ] I will not write to the UKPO this time [ ] I don't like being "alerted", don't spam me again

Kind regards,

Holger Blasum, FFII (a Eurolinux member organisation) (Alan Cox and Hartmut Pilch also had endorsed a draft version of this letter.)