Dear Mr D. Lepper, I am writing to you as a software developer for a small, but established and growing company located close to the sea in Brighton. I have been following the issue and progress of software patenting within Britain and the EU with great interest, and have recently become aware of further development that is of great relevance to me, and to the rest of the technologically-dependent industry that has grown up in Brighton over the last few years. As you may know, European Parliament voted for amendments to introduce strong restrictions on what can and cannot be patented, in terms of software-only inventions. These restrictions were designed to prevent monopolisation within the industry, and to protect true innovation whilst attempting to ensure the flexibility and competitiveness of companies within the market. On October 23rd, this Thursday, the Council of the European Union, or the Council of Ministers, will meet to prepare for a second meeting, on November 10th, at which it is probable that the UK ministers involved will attempt to push through an alternative text, originally drafted in November 2002, to the restrictions recently suggested. This alternative text would reverse many of the limitations upon patenting imposed by the recent draft, setting a course for a badly-thought-out, unfair patenting system within Europe. At stake is the definition of what is patentable, and how other developers may interact with the patented code in order to maintain a competitive balance, and avoid total domination in one particular area by those who claimed a patent first. As such, I respectfully ask you to being this letter and the information herein to the attention of MP Stephen Timms, the Minister of State for E-Commerce. Our company currently consists of around 15 people. It has been in business for around 3 years now and is heavily involved in providing open source software solutions to companies, organisations and councils. Prior to this, I worked with a company called Victoria Real, one of the more publicised and successful companies fostered in Brighton. I also have a large number of friends and contacts working in small technology companies within the Brighton and Hove area as well as nationally. As any experienced employee will inform you, it is essential for a company, whether small, medium or large, to be able to develop its ideas freely and flexibly, to be able to respond swiftly to the wants and needs of clients, and to be able to offer services through their work that are not necessarily tangible. With a loosely defined software patenting system in place, the avenues available to explore these necessities and to offer practical and reasonable goods would become excessively constrictive, and the survival of small/medium companies would be threatened, either through the prohibition of the use of an idea, or the resource-heavy and performance-crippling verification of those ideas, made necessary by a flawed patenting system. As a developer, I would be stifled both by having to avoid certain ideas, even if they were conceived indepently, or by having to check in the first place that an idea was legally okay to implement. In a field in which innovation of techniques is more often than not influenced by the idea of a final goal, or a problem to be overcome, there are only a limited number of rational ways to reach a target, once given one. As with, say, engineering, it is highly likely that a similar, if not identical solution to a given scenario would be achieved by many different people, even if they are separated in all aspects. There are certain techniques, developed over the last 50 years, that dictate how a particular case should be designed (rather than implemented). As such, it is extremely dangerous, and entirely against the original innovative intent of a patents system, to allow this kind of "invention" to be "owned" by a single company. I urge the Council of Ministers to avoid accepting the November 2002 draft text, to think critically and carefully about the patent proposal and its effects on business within Europe, and to extensively revise the text based on the recent Parliament amendments. I would appreciate any further feedback on the matter to the address given above.