Monday, March 7, 2005
EU software patents pass in the teeth of decency and democracy
Today, the EU Software Patents Directive passed. The proponents of this crippling regulation pushed this through with total disregard for the rules of the EU, cynically cooking the process and overruling the democratic process in order to create a regime that will punish Europe's software industry and public to the advantage of a few enormous software companies.
It is absolutely unfathomable what happened today. I cannot see how the promoters of the European Constitution can still support it with a straight face. This event shows that something is clearly rotten in the city of Brussels at the Council building. Why on Earth do we still have the rules that state that national parliaments should be taken into account by the Council?Link (Thanks Seb and Aymeric!)Things would be much easier if we scrapped all those rules and simply wrote down "The Council presidency and Commission can do together whatever they like". There's no need for those pesky democratically elected parliamentarians to interfere with the smooth decision making process of the Council, since its only goal appears to be to please big business and to produce as many texts as the sausage machine can bear.
This is absolutely disgusting.
Update: Tom sez, "Re: the swpat story... the directive hasn't passed (as in it is now law and we're all screwed). The Council has just officially adopted their (dangerous) version. It's now back Parliament... we still have three more rounds to stop the thing. Everyone should be arranging to meet their MEP right now!"
posted by Cory Doctorow at 08:11:21 AM permalink | Other blogs' comments
