Four Big Battles for EU Openness Happening Now - Open Enterprise

“Something seems to be going on in the European Union. Over the next few weeks a range of really important debates and votes are taking place, all connected with openness in some way... [1] ACTA ... First up, of course is ACTA. As you will know by now, the big vote takes place next week, following the rejection of ACTA by five important parliamentary committees... even at this late stage some amazing things are crawling out of the woodwork that MEPs need to be made aware of... [2] Software Patents ... EU patent: ‘In March 2011 the EU Council, with the support of the European Parliament, took a landmark decision to allow 25 EU member states to establish a unitary patent system under the ‘enhanced co-operation’ scheme. Unitary patents will be valid across the territory of the participating countries. This should pave the way for a true supranational patent system in Europe, something that has been discussed for decades and eagerly awaited by industry.’ Sounds totally reasonable, doesn't it? But one completely unmentioned consequence of the current proposal is that it would be easy for the European Patent Office to allow software patents officially, and not just through the back door. [3] Open Standards ... Long-suffering readers will recall that over the last few months I spent quite a lot of time and electrons discussing the battle for open standards in the UK. This boiled down to whether the UK government's definition of open standards should be licensed under FRAND or restriction free terms. Well, guess what? While that fight was going on in Blighty, another one was taking place in Brussels. To my shame, I only found out about this recently; things are looking bad, and there's not much time to do anything about it. By an amazing coincidence (or not), the issue is the same: should standards be licensed underFRAND or RF terms? This time, though, the current draft plumps for FRAND, with RF as optional... [4] Open access ... Finally, it seems that something bad is happening to the European Union's Horizon 2020 programme that I wrote about at the end of last year. One important feature of the proposed research programme for the EU was requiring open access to work generated using taxpayers' monies. But now it seems that idea is under threat, which means we need to remind MEPs why open access is important and must be safeguarded.”