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An open letter from Alan Cox

An open letter from Alan Cox

Posted Jun 1, 2004 11:36 UTC (Tue) by minichaz (guest, #630)
Parent article: An open letter from Alan Cox

I have been searching for a party for which I could vote in the European elections that clearly opposes software patents. I can not bring myself to vote for the UKIP party as I do not agree with them on many other issues. However, I would gladly vote for the green party if I could find somewhere where they clearly stated their policy regarding patents. Anyone know where this would be? I can't find anything about it on their website at all.

Agree or disagree with Europe, anyone who doesn't vote at all is a fool.

Nice letter Alan, thanks.

Cheers,
Charlie


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An open letter from Alan Cox

Posted Jun 1, 2004 13:52 UTC (Tue) by j_heald (guest, #15398) [Link]

An official position adopted by the Green party MEP group in the European Parliament can be found at:
http://www.greens-efa.org/en/documents/detail.php?id=63&lg=en

Strictly speaking, the Green Party of England and Wales has never considered software patents at party conference, and is not bound by the position of the MEP group, so technically has no policy on the subject. This independence is very important in the minds of some candidates.

In practice however, the elected Green/Plaid/SNP MEPs have been in the forefront of the campaign against software patents, and the Green party has put significant political resources behind it.

An open letter from Alan Cox

Posted Jun 3, 2004 13:32 UTC (Thu) by wookey (subscriber, #5501) [Link]

And in principle the UK Liberal Party also opposes software patents, but its MEPs voted consistently for them at the first reading: http://www.ffii.org/~bkaindl/votes/country/UK.html (red is 'bad' votes, green is 'good' votes from the FFII perspective, liberals is ELDR)

It's not clear if this is due to being ill-informed/confused or something more dastardly. Certainly the greens are the safest vote (or UKIP if you realy can't stand the EU). I'll be asking mine (Liberal) in person tomorrow in Cambridge what the hell he thinks he's playing at (having writen sensible-sounding things to me before the vote then voted for unlimited patentability when it came to the crunch, against party policy. I'm deeply unimpressed.

More details here: http://www.ffii.org.uk/uk_meps.html

The important thing to remember for those who are anti-EU (and thus presumably pro-UK) is that the UK Govt is massively pro-swpat and has been driving this process from the beginning. It takes (so far) very little notice of lobbying from SMEs like myself. The EU has been a paragon of democracy in comparison.

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