Dear ...,

We would like to invite you to a dialogue with members of the European Parliament, software stakeholders and scientists, both in cyberspace and in reality, on April 14th and on November 9-10 in Brussels, on the extremely contentious questions of EU software patent policy. After the European Parliament decided that software should be subject to copyright only, the Commission and Council want software to be covered by both copyright and patents. The person in charge at the Commission will be at our conference.

As the program at :

         http://plone.ffii.org/events/2004/bxl04/prep/

shows, we have three subjects, each of which has its associated discussion forum:

         Panel I (chair: Olga Zrihen MEP)
         Recent Developments in Patent Granting and Enforcement
         http://lists.ffii.org/mailman/listinfo/bxl44panel1/

         Panel II (chair: Piia-Noora Kauppi MEP)
         Benchmarking of legislative proposals: EP vs Council
         http://lists.ffii.org/mailman/listinfo/bxl44panel2/

         Panel III (chair: Daniel Cohn-Bendit MEP)
         Patents and Competitivity of Knowledge Economies
         http://lists.ffii.org/mailman/listinfo/bxl44panel3/

I suspect that Panel III would benefit most from your participation.

Simultaneous interpreting is available throughout the conference.

The discussion will continue virtually after the session in Brussels and hopefully lead to a book publication soon after the november conference.

Would you be interested in participating?

I am cc-ing to the three shadow chairmen of the panels who are helping with preparing the contributions and proposing questions to the chairmen.

-- ::

Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance tel. +49-89-18979927 Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation http://swpat.ffii.org/ 300,000 votes 2000 firms against software patents http://noepatents.org/