Stop software patents in Europe!

March 10th, 2005

I’m not going to waste too many electrons in expounding what a deranged and fundamentally bad idea the European Directive on Computer Implemented Inventions (aka European software patents) is - there are many, many people who can explain that far better (here’s a few:

And I’m not going to waste too many electrons on the travesty of the democratic process that has taken place, with a Commissioner in the pocket of the corporate software cartel ramming through a piece of legislation that has been comprehensively rejected numerous times.

The bottom line is that it’s happened, and there’s one last chance to do something about it. For the directive to be kicked into touch it needs to be rejected by a majority of MEPs in the European Parliament - 347 of them, to be precise. So now is the time to start lobbying your MEPs to prevent this happening.

If it does, then open-source software as we know it will be lawyergrammed out of existence. Software will exist only by permission of Microsoft and Cisco and Nokia - anyone seeking to challenge the behemoths will simply be stamped out though the abuse of the patent process.

So write, call, email and fax. If the Directive passes, it’s because the corporations wanted it to happen - not because there’s any kind of a democratic mandate for it. This sets the direction for the kind of society that we want to live in - on the one hand, beholden to the best interests of the shareholders of a few giant (and largely American) corporate cartels; or on the other a society that balances the interests of society as a whole against those of the corporations.

It’s our choice.

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