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7 March 2005 -- The Council Presidency today declared the software agreement of 18 May 2004 to have been adopted, in violation of the procedural rules and in spite of the evident lack of a qualified majority of member states and the requests of three states to reopen negotiations. This is a very sad day for democracy, and casts a very dark shadow over the European Constitution, which will give the Council even more power. (Yes, the text from 18th May 2004 is the original text, before the European Parliament changes, the one that legitimises software patents precisely as requested by Microsoft and other proprietary software producers.) Jonas Maebe, FFII Board Member: 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? Things would be much more 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. http://wiki.ffii.org/Cons050307En There will now be no restart of the process, as requested by JURI and the European Parliament, there will be no large scale changes to the original directive, the EP amendments have already been rejected and not likely to even be considered without substantial alteration *towards* the original directive. Democracy? What's that? The claim that the directive had been rejected, *The European Parliament has thrown out a bill that would have allowed software to be patented.* http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/4274811.stm now sounds hollow indeed. -- Neil Williams ============= http://www.dcglug.org.uk/ http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/isbnsearch/ http://www.neil.williamsleesmill.me.uk/ http://www.biglumber.com/x/web?qs=0x8801094A28BCB3E3
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