FFII Week blog - Day 3

Today I did get the breakfast - yay! I did hovewer get late to the first panel and only got the end of it. I got a few nice pictures and heard a great reaction from the chair - one person tried to make a statement that the pure software "like the Amazon one-click" is not patentable now and will not be patendable under Councils directive - the chair replied "It is an already granted Europeant patent number xxxxxxx, next question" ;) The applause went for a few minutes.
After a nice diner we went to the second panel chaired by Mr. Dombrovskis.
It started a bit late with a bit of technical problems, as they always do. I think that Dombrovskis handled it very well with a nice intro and some kind of 15 second summaries that did help to better understand the presentations -- they really were quite complex.
The third panel started with a representative from a Polish IT association. He spoke very strictly against SWPat, but very broadly. Representative from BEUC - consumer assosiation of EU. One point raised was that, while software must be excluded from the protection, the source must still be published in the patent if it is essential to the invention. EICTA person said to support Council position, but against SWPat. Said that patents are needed to defend against foreign companies (despite 90% of EU SWPat are owned by USA and Japan). Kauppi (shadow reporter of the directive, antiswpat) was a bit bleak on the last panel and dropped a bomb saying that excluding of data processing from patentability is too broad and undefendable. That is bad news.