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."

Comments

Away from tech

[gowen]

Our years-long fight has shown how undemocratic the EU is. It is a system in which bureaucrats can make decisions that, practically speaking, the public can never reverse.

Software patents aside, this is a really crucial point. Every anti-EU politician in Europe should be hammering on this point (using Software Patents as an example), and on the fact that corruption is so widespread that the EU's own auditors have refused to sign off on the accounts for year after year.

Re:Interesting article from RMS

[Lifewish]

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.

FFII web site taken down

[alanxyzzy]

IN related news, this ZDNet article reports that the German software company Nutzwerk has obtained a court order taking the FFII's web site offline.

In the meantime, please use nosoftwarepatents.com instead, where you will find more information on the issue.