Ever since the EC tried to pass the patents directive onto voting at the Parliament as an A-item at a Council of Agriculture and Fisheries, for some reason I assumed that they'd sunk about as low as they could go.
Not so. In the face of overwhelming opposition from the democratically elected Parliament to this corporate-brought directive, what does the CoM do? They ignore them. And try again. As we've thanked the Polish, Dutch and Germans, among others, we now have the Danes to be grateful to for telling their Commission representative to, you know, represent them. And even then the Commission ignores them. Unbelievable.
Software patents delenda est.
Hi, Ian - I have cited this post in my Weekly BlogScan, this week titled "Living with Disappointment." To read the citation or comment, please join these two segments into one URL:
ReplyDeletehttp://blogcritics.org/archives/
2005/06/10/211021.php
I also cited your SF post a few days earlier than this one.
Hi drpat,
ReplyDeleteJust to clarify, it's the European Commission (EC) that's trying to push through the bad directive, and the European Parliament that was doing the right thing in attempting to derail the process.
The two separate institutions have completely different ideas about what the directive should contain, and obviously I'm somewhat biased on the issue :-)