Re: [Fsfe-uk] EU swpat - Ag and Fish attempt 2

[Alex Hudson]

On Sat, 2005-01-22 at 16:07 +0000, Philip Hands wrote:
> >>The sneaky lawyers who want to get rich by parasitising our industry were 
> >>hoping that the dumb farmers wouldn't notice that this directive was being 
> >>shoved through their council.
> > 
> > I don't think that's quite the case 
> 
> Yeah, I know, but once I'd typed the above, it struck me as an amusing spin 
> to put on the whole thing, that might provoke people to actually go and 
> have a look at what was occurring.

Oh, well, bravo in that case :)

> I agree absolutely, but the fact that the original discussion was flawed, 
> and that the people representing the pro-patent position intentionally 
> muddy the waters with their "technical effect"s and "as such"s makes the 
> whole thing underhanded from the outset, so ascribing evil intent to them 
> at every step seems entirely fair to me.  Especially when they're trying to 
> squeeze the directive through before anyone has chance to object, which 
> appears to be the case here.

Yeah.

The latest from the UKPO is that they are going to arrange a series of
workshops examining different definitions of "technical effect", and
whether or not they have the consequences we say they do. I think this
puts them in a somewhat bizarre position though: they are still clearly
debating the different definitions (and I believe this is going to be a
fully public consultation), whilst supporting the EU legislation in its
worst forms.

I think this gives us a very good case to go to the Ministers and say,
"Hey, it's clear that you haven't given this enough thought - you're
still trying to work out the ramifications of 'technical effect'. We
should not trying to push through legislation when it's not clear we are
in favour of it!". If we are going to instigate a letter writing
campaign - and I think that we should, given that this legislation is,
one way or another, going to go back to Parliament very soon, this seems
like an excellent line of attack. Even better would be giving some
examples of a faulty definition of "technical effect" which would cause
UK industry problems.

I'm going to try to re-vamp the AFFS swpat pages over the next few days,
as well as update www.softwarepatents.co.uk (which, while not timely,
should still be correct). This was mostly prompted by John Seago's
request for information useful for letter writing, but I think I would
like to see more people follow his lead. Now seems a particularly good
time for putting some quality pressure on our MEPs. 

Cheers,

Alex.