Danish EU Presidency Motto: "Growth, Prosperity and Patents"

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

The Internal Market people of thenew Danish presidency appear to have
chosen "Growth, Prosperity and Patents" as a motto for their work:

http://www.eu2002.dk/calendar/meetinginfo.asp?iCalendarID=3811

Is it that governments, in their search of "growth and prosperity", are
becoming so desperate that they will ardently believe any snake-oil
salesman who comes along with a recipe?

At least the minister of education and research in germany

        http://swpat.ffii.org/players/bulmahn/
        http://swpat.ffii.org/players/bmbf/

is enthusiastic about "patent recipes" (Patentrezepte), as we call magic
snake-oil formulas in colloquial german.  I never thought that this term
might turn out to be so literally true.

There were elections recently in DK.  The ministery of commerce seems to
trust his patent office even more cluelessly than before.

Maybe by reading some of the PDF documents you can find out what is going
on here. Although we know that the DK government is together with the UK
government (represented by its patent office) the most devoted promoter of
software patents, the patent hype expressed in "growth, prosperity and
patents" seems to mark a new record.  It goes even beyond EPO president
Kober's

        One Europe, one currency, one patent
        http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/eporep97/

hype of 1997, which inaugurated the drive for legalisation of swpat.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-12789608
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
120,000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/