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Dutch Parliament Reverses Software Patent Vote
Sanity writes "On May 18th, by a thin majority, the European Council of Ministers voted in favor of throwing out the European Parliament's efforts to keep software patents out of Europe. According to an FFII press release, the Dutch Parliament yesterday voted to change its Minister's vote, which was in favor, to an abstension. This is an unprecidented move and a great coup for those fighting against software patents, never before has a country reversed a vote in this manner. While this is not sufficient to reverse the decision of the Council of Ministers, it does pave the way for other countries, many of which were pressured into an affirmative vote, to do the same. Now is the time for citizens of the EU to put pressure on their national governments to follow the Dutch lead."
It says that the vote of the Council of Ministers was on May 18th, but that the Dutch Parliament's vote to change their minister's vote was yesterday...so it is current news.
Actually, we are from The Netherlands. And don't forget our tulips. And we lured Andrew S. Tanenbaum to our Vrije Universiteit.
Please use this link instead, it goes to a static version of the linked page. It would be nice if an editor could update the story itself as well, thanks.
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The vote was changed because the parliament was misinformed about software patents.
It was the Minister, who voted in favour of software patents. The Parliament told him: You voted wrongly. Two different things.
The correct term is "political agreement on a common position of the Council", which indeed still has to be formalised afterwards.
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Our dutch political groups were (alomst) all oposed to the law.
The person who was going to vote is the leading person of one of our political groups (that group was oposed to the new law even more than most others)
He decided to vote in favor if the proposal would be changed to be a much nicer law.
The proposal was changed to some extend, but not as far as what he descussed and promised to the rest of his group and the other groups.
He voted in favor of the law, and everyone was stunned!
Things started to rumble as his own party was starting to ask questions.
A dutch digital freedom organisation made a propsition to the different party's to change the vote.
The voter replied that he would not change his vote as that could be harmfull to his party and carreer.
And now all of sudden, probably after more talking and lobying he did change, (or someone else made him)
The decision to originally vote for the software patents directive was based on incorrect information. When this was clear they changed their mind.
ffii
"The European Parliament's version asserted that patents would only be allowed for industrial inventions (e.g. washing machines) and would not be made possible for pure software. All these adaptations were removed in the Council of Ministers' controversial version.
Earlier, Brinkhorst described the Council proposal to the Dutch Parliament as a compromise with the EP. In recent legislative debates, Van Gennip was forced to admit that this was incorrect information, and attributed it to "an error in the word processor." "
-doh!
Read the article, it'll probably make a difference (at least the FFII seems to think so). Besides, it still can become a 'negative'. The parliament choose for abstaining, since they were misinformed by the Minister and needed more time to read through the text. Although I'm not aware if the vote from yesterday will now be final, or is a preliminary vote. I'll get back to you on that...
"Want some rye? 'Course you do!" - Return to Zork
I think you don't understand the political process in Europe. When the European "government" makes a rule, this means all European countries have to implement laws that take this rule into account. This is why governments can change their opinions, when the national governments decide that this rule is not consistent with the rest of the laws.
I agree that this is a lengthy process, but since Europe is trying the harmonize the legislation of a lot of countries, hickups like these are to be expected, and it is in fact frightening that it does not happen more often. There is, for instance, a sort of European arrest warant, as a consequence of which any european country is required to arrest and handover a citizen if this person is to appear in a court of a different country. Given Amnesty Int.'s recent negative report on criminal prosecution in many European countries, this might not have been such a good idea.
-- Please put this in your sig if you think
It's not dirty at all. The Dutch minister misinformed the national parliament before the vote on the political agreement. This came to light, and now he has to bear the consequences. If anyone played dirty here, it's the minister.
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Note however that the vote was on "a political agreement on a common position of the Council", and that until this political agreement is formalised, no official vote has taken place yet. Of course, it's very much "not done" to change your stance after a political agreement has been reached, but there are no juridical hurdles which prevent you from doing that.
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there were 2 motions. the motion to abstain (by PvdA, dutch labour party) made it, the motion to completely reverse the decision (done by SP, the socialist party) was turned down.
No one can understand the truth until he drinks of coffee's frothy goodness.
--Sheikh Abd-Al-Kadir, 1587
I was at the previous committee meeting. All the MPs that were there were not happy with the minister and secretary, but the MP (Vendrik (sp?)) who proposed the motion came to the conclusion that a negative vote was unreachable. IMO primarily because of the CDA- and VVD-fractions, who were not happy with the way the EP-EC vote went, but only partially against software patents per se.
Is there an official record of the proceedings of the Dutch Parliament, similar to the UK's Hansard, to which I can direct the attention of my MP? I'm not sure that a wiki page at the FFII website will carry sufficient authority to prompt her to try the same thing here.
flossie
Write now. Defend liberty
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The title of the article says the Netherlands reverse their vote. That is just plain wrong. They actually are changing it from a "yes" to an abstention, not to a "no".It's good, but it's not a "reversal".
You are mistaken and ignoring a rather relevant fact.
The council of ministers IGNORED the explicit vote from the EU parliament in this matter. The minister did a bad job and the Dutch parliament told him so.
It means that something went really wrong. In our case, the Minister said to the Dutch Parliament that there was agreement between the European Parliament and the Council of Ministers, which was absolutely not the case.
In our communications with politicians, it became clear that they had no idea what was going on. Because of the clear case of misinformation, we were able to get the attention of the Parliament, so we could inform them of the situation.
What was really important was that we had the European Parliament on our hand.
What hopefully happens now is that the Dutch decision triggers the attention in the other European Countries, so they start talking to their people in the European Parliament and to local representatives of the FFII and other organisations.
In case you're interested: read all about our efforts at: osnews.com
The difference is mostly psychological/politcal.
Say no to software patents.
English-speaking people do.
Even if the patent is invalid, a law suit to get the patent invalidated costs between $US 1,500,000 and $US 2,000,000 depending on who you listen to. Great protection of investment...
Summarised: patents have both good and bad effects. The economic studies from my previous post show that the bad effects are worse in case of software patents than the good ones (and undermine other forms of already existing protection for investments in software). So the logical conclusion is: no software patents.
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Typically the EU commission (the commission is the closest thing to a EU cabinet) will propose a new law. The proposal will be considered by the EU Parliament (elected by popular vote), which will issue an opinion. In this specific case the Parliaments opinion included a wide number of changes to prevent software patents.
After the parliament decides on their opinion, the Council of Ministers (ministers of the governments of the member states) vote. In this case the council decided to disregard parliaments opinion and their changes.
However, since it is usually impractical to make official translations to all the official languages, the council needs to vote again on the officially sanctioned translated texts. Only this vote is binding. This is what gave the Dutch a chance to force their minister to change the vote.
Once the Council has voted, the law goes to the EU Parliament for a second reading. If the Parliament approves the legislation or does nothing, the law goes to the Council which can then approve the law by qualified majority. Once so approved, it is the duty of the member states to change their national laws to be consistent with the EU law where needed.
If the parliament REJECTS the law with absolute majority, the council can still adopt the law, but only with unanimity. So if the parliament rejects this law with absolute majority on the second reading it's dead.
If the parliament amends the law with absolute majority, the changes go to the commission. If the commission accepts the changes, the council is authorised to approve the law with a qualified majority. If the commission rejects the changes, the council can only approve the law with unaminity.
In this case the commission is likely to reject any significant changes suggested by the parliament on the second reading, since it wanted the law in the first place.
So it's not as if this change would have automatically become law if the Dutch hadn't changed their mind - it was only about halfway through the process.
First of all, the Players:
Next, there are several possible decision procedures, but I only know one in detail: the co-decision procedure, which is what the software patents directive goes through. It's actually the procedure most directives go through nowadays. It works like this:
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Legally, the minister has voted on behalf of the dutch government. All actions of the government are ultimately controlled by the dutch parliament. Now, the parliament has decided that the minister should excercise a legal loophole and revoke the the vote.
Technically the minister can decide not to do this in which case a vote of no confidence may follow (after a debate with the minister on his reasons for not revoking his vote). However, given the political consequences of this scenario, this is unlikely to happen. A vote of no confidence would be rather damaging to all three of the coalition parties (given the recent polls) since it would likely result in new elections and result in a loss of the majority they are currently enjoying.
Given this context there are two scenarios. Either the parliament will look the other way if the minister ignores them (this will be settled behind closed doors and the opposition will make lots of noise) or the minister will revoke his vote. Given his earlier comments, the minister will favour the first option and will put lots of pressure on the three coalition parties to look the other way.
The only way to prevent this from happening is media attention. So far this has been pretty much a non issue in the media (few people understand what this debate is about). If this doesn't change, parliament won't work too hard on this issue. On the other hand if there is too much pressure on the minister, the coalition parties will likely back off to prevent a vote of no confidence.
Jilles
Given that the Netherlands changed its opinion, they may also start thinking about the reason for which this happened. I.o.w.: a pretty serious political event, lots of press attention, a change for the good in the Dutch position. What better PR could you want?
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