[ale] EU Software Patent Vote

[James P. Kinney III]

On Tue, 2005-07-19 at 13:53 -0600, Michael Hirsch wrote:

> My understanding is the same as Ken's.  Enough amendments went in to
> make the law unpalatable to both sides of the issue.  For instance, in
> the usually very clear and precise coverage in LinuxWeeklyNews
> (subscription required until Thursday, I think)
> http://lwn.net/Articles/142903/
> 
> "This vote is not a result of a sudden general understanding that
> software patents are a bad idea. In the end, most parties went against
> the directive because (1) it had been amended to the point that nobody
> liked it anymore, and (2) the parliament was not pleased with how it
> had been treated by the European Council. So the vote should not be
> seen as a definitive statement from Europe on software patents; it
> also should not be seen as the end of the debate."

As sad is it is despicable, sometimes poisoning the waterhole is the
best way to get people to go home.

I suspect that some back-room politics happened to lessen the US backed
strong-arming on this. The "save face" way was to add unpalatable
amendments so that it would die and those being muscled could tell the
muscle they "_wanted_ to vote for it until this other stuff came in". I
would almost like to know the order and author of the poisonous
amendments. Add that to knowing the daily schedules of their assistants
for the week or so prior to the death of the bill to sort out who was
getting muscled and who they got to author the poison scripting.
-- 
James P. Kinney III          \Changing the mobile computing world/
CEO & Director of Engineering \          one Linux user         /
Local Net Solutions,LLC        \           at a time.          /
770-493-8244                    \.___________________________./
http://www.localnetsolutions.com

GPG ID: 829C6CA7 James P. Kinney III (M.S. Physics)
<jkinney at localnetsolutions.com>
Fingerprint = 3C9E 6366 54FC A3FE BA4D 0659 6190 ADC3 829C 6CA7
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