Slashdot Mirror
Europeans, Tweak Your Representatives On Patents
zoobab writes "The FFII is launching a call for
action to push European candidates to answer questions on Software
Patents. Alan Cox has also written a open letter in
which he points out that those European elections are an opportunity for
each citizen to have the choice and to make the politicians listen. Get the
questionnaire and send it to the candidates
of your country!"
Just a reminder to people that you can't believe a word that a politician says.
Actions speak louder than words and you can find out here how they voted:
http://www.ffii.org.uk/uk_meps.html
It would be nice to see something similar for the other countries.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
BOF (Bits Of Freedom) has an document online [dutch] where they examined what our politicians voted on several "computer/internet related" laws, including software patents. (English version of BOF is here, but I couldn't find an english version of this document)
You're old school? I beta tested the motherf***ing abacus!
Here's what some of the Swedish candidates had to say about software patents http://mnemo.nu/publicerat/2004/may/candidates.php .
FFII Sweden also put together information brochure, which is perfect to print out and leave in strategic places around the office (coffee tables, lunch room etc.)
Electronic Frontier Finland ry has already send a questionnaire about software patents, spam, copyright etc. to the Finnish candidates. They have set up a page where you can compare your oppinions with those of the ones who answered.
Don't talk bollocks. Not all of the parties have the same policies. You can quite clearly see from the following table which parties vote which way...
t ml
http://www.ffii.org.uk/votes/swpat/country/UK.h
So not only do you vote for one of their opposition, you tell your current MEPs how you are going to vote and why...
The thing about the european parliament is that it is a proportional representation system which means that your vote *DOES* count. If you vote for a Green, it increases the numbers of Greens in the parliament.
Government of the people, by corporate executives, for corporate profits.
Robert Kilroy-Silk is one of their candidates. I think that says it all.
Vote Green!
Allergy advice: Contains eggs.
Roughly, the two largest parties, the social democrats (socialdemokraterna) and the right wing party (moderaterna), are in favor of software patents while the rest, the liberals (folkpartiet), the leftmost party (vaensterpartiet), the greens (miljoepartiet),... are against.
(I'm voting for Olle Schmidt of the liberal party but I'm not affiliated with anything above.)
The BBC produce a nice list of all candidates by area:m
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/3708131.st
Well I would be glad to help them out of their spot, free gratis (own a successful web design company), if they would respond to any of the efforts I have made to contact them!
I noticed that there was no Irish branch of the FFII on the last slashdot story about this issue (maybe thats changed since, I don't know), so I also tried to reach them regarding setting up a local branch over here.
No response whatsoever. I couldn't even get through on the phone lines! I don't know what sort of an operation they are running, but so far I have to say I am less than impressed. If they think they can divert the beaurocratic juggernaut that is the EU with anything less than cohesive organisation and directed efforts, they are sadly mistaken.
Beh, like most things, I'll just have to go ahead and do it myself...
What he can't kill, he has sex on. Trent.
In the UK at least, the Liberal Democrats seem to have some idea at least about copyright and patents as they relate to software. This paper mentions software patents as a bad thing, states that allowing only copyright protection on code rather than patents encourage competition in the software market place, along with a bunch of other generally sensible ideas.