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Richard Stallman on EU Software Patents
schreibmaschine writes "Richard Stallman writes in The Guardian that the defeat of the EU directive has bought time, but that the pro-patent forces will regroup and try again."
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Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
The Ministers (nominated by their countries) form a Council. This Council produces directives which are then passed to the Parliament (made up of elected MEPs) for ratification (or whatever else they choose to do with them). A directive is, if I understand correctly, roughly equivalent to a US "Bill" - it's a chunk of suggested legislation, which all countries in the EU would then be required to implement in their legislation.
In this particular case, the Council drafted a universally-loathed directive to legalise software patents. The Parliament made changes and sent it back. The Council stripped out the changes. A rapporteur (negotiator) was appointed; the Council ignored his suggestions completely. The Council refused to actually discuss it despite being legally required to (some of the members of the Council had been told off by their national parliaments and required to change it). Eventually the Parliament threw it out completely.
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
In the meantime, please use nosoftwarepatents.com instead, where you will find more information on the issue.
A "directive" is a decision by the European council of ministers and the EU parliament about how the EU member states have to shape their national law. While a directive is not a law by itself, member states have to adopt it or they will be in violation of the EU treaty.
;-). As the example of the German representative shows, they sometimes vote against the explicit wishes of their countries' parliament.
:-(
A few words about the actors in this game:
-The council of ministers consists of representatives of the member states' governments. Usually ministers
-The EU parliament is directly elected by the citizens of the member states, in a EU-wide election.
The process of creating a EU directive:
Only the council of ministers can propose a new directive. The parliament can propose changes, but if the council insists on its version of the directive, the parliament can only reject the directive completely. This also requires an absolute majority of the members of parliament, so a divided or not fully present parliament will usually be unable to stop a directive.
Obviously, this arrangement gives the council of ministers more power in directive-making than the EU parliament. I believe that this is undermining the checks and balances a proper democracy should have, but the parliaments of the EU member states seemed to have no problem ratifying the treaty that established these terms. The "Enabling Act" of 1933 comes to mind
C - the footgun of programming languages
There is 2 rounds where it goes between the council and the parliament.
The council didnt listen to the parliament, didnt negociate and even tried to bypass them. The parliament needed more than the absolute majority to reject the proposal at the last round. Since they had been so dispised by the council, they voted NO in force.
Problem is that the european way of handling laws can bypass the democratical circuits. If your parliament is against a law, in most european country the law is dead.
Not anymore with the eu, you just have to have it agreed by your fellow council members (which are president or ministers like you and will return the favor). If the law passes so, then your parliament HAS TO accept the law. They failed with patents, but many other projects pass that way.
So the eu parliament is the last democratical power in the EU, yet it just has the power to reject laws, and with extreme difficulty as this law showed. And there are other ways to bypass it.
All in all, the situation is extremly shitty and Mr Stallman is probably right. EU is slowly turning in what it tries to be an alternative for: a mega power corrupted by corporations lobbying.
A directive is a standard to which national law is required to comply before a certain deadline, otherwise the country can be fined and its justice decisions overturned by appeals to EU courts.
There is currently no directive standardizing patent law in Europe, and thus there is a lot of legal uncertainty as to the real enforcability of the many patents, including software patents issued by the European Patent Office from country to country.
Big corporation wanted, on the occasion of a directive cleaning up things, for this directive to explicitely validate software patents, and drafted the directive accordingly. The European parliement initially amended the draft to explicitely exclude _most_ software patents. The Council, made up of the cabinet-level person in charge from each country, largely unaccountable to their national parliements in the matter, reverted the amendments to again allow software patents and sent the draft back to the parliement (which meanwhile had been elected anew), which refused to vote it as is, but this time didn't write new amendments.
The directive has been dropped at that point so we're back to the legal uncertainty, but at least with no explicit software patents at the EU level.
Nonsense. European law is already binding on "formerly sovereign" member states (and has been since 1963). The EU constitution actually would have shifted more power towards the European Parliament, which would have made a fiasco like the patent thing less likely.
I think that the defeat of the constitution was a huge mistake. It kind of dooms Europe to less relevance on the world stage and years of stagnation.
The Commission is one thing, the Council another. The obvious problem with the commission is that it is non-elected and non-accountable, however to a certain extent. We must remember that a commission was cornered into resignation by a parliementary enquiry a while ago, and this Italian homophobic dude who was kept out also based on parliementary pressure. The Commission is supposedly strictly technocratic and apolitical, and in reality very strongly ideologically molded into a free-market worshipping sorcerer apprentice that thinks Europe should be turned into the ultimate Adam Smith lab test.
However the commission only drafts directives, and doesn't vote on them. Its defeat on the patent directive shows that there are limits to its powers after all, and its bad name puts it right in the cross-hairs of each and every EU bashing force in Europe.
Another problem is the Council. As a meeting of national government representative, they bear the seal of democracy. The problem with them is that their debades occur behind closed doors, and in effect there is few oversight from the individual nations political forces. One solution is to institutionalize the oversight of Council discussions by national parliements, which the draft constitution did in a way that was too weak to be valuable.