Europe Votes Against Software Patents
The European parliament voted to reject software patents. The vote was 648 to 14 with 18 abstentions to reject the legislation. The software industry in Europe has reason to celebrate. The European Commission drafted legislation ended up pleasing nobody. Apparently the European Commission will not submit new legislation on the subject. The legislation, would have made software patents legal in Europe and reduced the European patents system to the completely broken level of the US Patents Office.
The Irish software industry has been distinctively anti-software patents. The problem is that the big players were the ones with the budgets for PR and for planting stories in the Irish media that the Irish software industry was pro-software patents.
A bunch of self-appointed operations claiming to represent the Irish software industry were lobbying hard to portray the Irish software industry as being pro-software patents. The reality is that these organisations really were just shills for Microsoft and their friends. The average small programming business is not going to waste money on joining these organisations. Big companies however will. Thus what these organisations end up representing is the party line of large multinationals rather than the Irish software industry.
The Irish software industry has been anti-software patents with a few exceptions. This has been a victory for the European software industry and the people of Europe.
Tags: Irishblogs - Software Patents - EU - Open Source- Free Software
Written by John McCormac on July 6th, 2005 with comments disabled.
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