Toby Churchill
CEO of Toby Churchill Ltd

We use proprietary text-to-speech software on our devices, but much of the infrastructure for our projects comes from Open Source software, which we have been both a significant contributor to, and a beneficiary of. Open Source software is central to our very successful business model. As you are probably aware, the Open Source movement protects its contributors by copyright and specifically not by patent.

The prospect of US-style software patents being implemented in Europe seems to be a very dangerous and retrograde step for any small to medium sized software company. In very nearly all cases, copyright seems be sufficient IP protection. The current patent climate seems reminiscent of a kind of "land grab" where companies amass a large patent portfolio in order to exert undue influence in the market place and suppress original work from smaller competitors. A small company attempting to challenge a large company over patent infringement carries the attendant risk that the larger company will identify patent infringements (or suggest possible ones) by the smaller company - which does not have the resources to investigate the claim. This encourages frivolous patents because of litigation-fear.

I have watched the ongoing battles re EU software patents and am now firmly of the view that this has little to do with the encouragement of innovation afforded by IP protection and all to do with big company politics putting the squeeze on their smaller and more agile competitors. There is also a concern that it may be an attempt by the American (and Japanese?) corporations to suppress the challenge from European SMEs.

There is a very real risk that if software patenting becomes a practical reality then small software houses will go out of business as they are either unable or unwilling to fund departments sufficient to ensure that they don't infringe patents. How will a small company doing original work check on all of IBM's 40,000 worldwide patents for example? If they survive, the cost to SMEs in wasted effort will be enormous as well as profoundly demotivating.

Innovators are invariably much more interested in solving their own technical challenges than navigating the legal minefield set up for them by legislators.

We support amendments such as those of Mr Rocard as a good way of preventing software patents, yet still allowing genuine inventions which might be implemented with computer assistance or control.