22 February 2002. Thanks to Anonymous

The EU's proposed directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions has been public for a week or so now. "Properties" of the attached MS Word version of the directive shows that the last person who worked on this file is Francisco Mingorance:

http://cryptome.org/proposal.doc

Mingorance is the top EU lobbyist for the Business Software Alliance, to be exact, their Director of Public Policy (Europe). BSA are the main activists for patentability of software and also oppose Free Software in Europe. BSA's office happens to be right beside the European Parliament.

The "properties" dialogue - even if it doesn't really prove Mingorance actually worked the whole thing out - shows he's had this doc on his computer two weeks before its actual publication. Such things may be faked, of course.

I guess the EU Commission's standing on this thing will show whether they really have industry lobbyists draft their directives.

Maybe you can ask someone with a little more expertise than I have to check the doc history. SPRL in the "company" referrer in the properties dialog is the Belgian law equivalent to "Inc.", thus does not say a lot.

The paper as published by the Commission on February 20th can be found at:

http://europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/en/indprop/com02-92de.pdf

It includes minor changes only; different size is due mainly to to financial effects statement left from that version.

BSA EU Web site: http://www.bsa.org/europe/policy/