No restart, no democracy
The European Commission has declined to comply with the restart of the software patents directive, as requested unanimously by the Committee on Legal Affairs of the European Parliament and the whole European Parliament in plenary.
“The EU Commission, under the leadership of someone who previously failed as Portuguese prime minister and as per the suggestion of a Microsoft puppet, has decided to decline the European Parliament’s request for restarting the process on the software patent directive”, is how Slashdot gently puts it, paraphrasing the NoSoftwarePatents campaign statement.
According to the FFII, this signifies that the Commission’s DG Internal Market is apparently determined to destroy the directive by trying to get the European Parliament to massively reject the directive in second reading, since the Commission’s stance amounts to an outright challenge.
I wish I could believe that the Parliament will take a heroic stand for democracy and demolish this abomination in second reading, but it will take an absolute majority to accomplish that and I really don’t see how this could be achieved, in light of such horrendous lobbying. And I don’t hold any hope at all for a behind-the-scenes fair Conciliation; everything that has been achieved thus far is because the issue was made to stand in front of the media, despite obfuscation tactics on the part of the Commission.
As for the rest of us poor sods; sure, we can protest again, but if the will of the European Parliament can be so easily sideswiped (all it took was one visit to Brussels by Bill Gates!), what chance do the people have?
And now, for the Roll of Shame: Frits Bolkestein. Charlie McCreevy. José Manuel Barroso. And the Irish EU Presidency of 2004, sponsored by Microsoft.
Remember them, when one day you wonder how we began to lose democracy and self-determination in Europe. Whoever thinks this only affects programmers, or is only about software is sorely mistaken. However, where software is concerned, we will soon be in the same sorry boat as the americans, upon whom we heaped so much ridicule in recent years. Say hello to 30000+ imported patents, say goodbye to an independent and innovative european ICT industry.
Myself, I’ll stick around in ICT for a little while longer, see how this resolves. Afterwards, I’ll probably look for a completely different thing to do, since I don’t really find the prospect of emigrating to the other hemisphere, in order to be able to develop software, enticing. Not farming or gardening or biotech of any kind, though; there’s plenty of patents in them thar weeds and genomes..
