Council Presidency "Adopts" Software Patent Agreement

[Jonas Maebe <jonas.maebe@ugent.be>]

PRESS RELEASE FFII -- [ Europe / economy / ICT ]

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Council Presidency "Adopts" Software Patent Agreement
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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 several states to reopen
negotiations.

Report

 * Cyprus submitted a written declaration at the start of the Council
   session
 * Poland, Denmark, Portugal and others (not specified) asked for a B
   item (discussion point)
 * The Luxembourg presidency claimed this was not possible due to
   procedural reasons, and that this would have undermined the whole
   process -> it would stay on the list of A-items
 * Luxembourg then gave a long statement regarding how the EP still
   gets a chance in second reading, the importance of avoiding legal
   uncertainty etc.
 * Denmark said it was disappointed about this, but accepted and
   submitted a written declaration
 * Later on, the list of A items was accepted by the Council

Conclusion

 * Luxembourg negated the Council's [1]own Rules of Procedure, which
   state that a B-item (which is at the same time a request to remove
   an A item) can only be rejected by the a majority of the Council,
   and not just by the Presidency.
 * The objecting countries "forgot" to request removal of the A-item
   from the agenda. Rule 3.8 would have given any single country the
   right to have the A-item removed, because the Luxemburg presidency
   had failed to insert it more than 14 days earlier. It is difficult
   to believe that they were not aware of this possibility.
 * 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.

Jonas Maebe, FFII Board Member, comments:

  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.


More News

 Coming up at http://wiki.ffii.org/Cons050307En
 Council press briefing:
   http://ue.eu.int/ueDocs/cms_Data/docs/pressData/en/misc/84021.pdf

Contact

 Dieter Van Uytvanck, dietvu@ffii.org, tel. +32 499 16 70 10
 Jonas Maebe, jmaebe@ffii.org, tel. +32 485 36 96 45
 Hartmut Pilch, phm@ffii.org, tel. +49 89 18979927

About FFII -- http://www.ffii.org

   The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII) is a
   non-profit association registered in several European countries, 
which
   is dedicated to the spread of data processing literacy. FFII supports
   the development of public information goods based on copyright, free
   competition, open standards. More than 500 members, 1,200 companies
   and 75,000 supporters have entrusted the FFII to act as their voice 
in
   public policy questions concerning exclusion rights (intellectual
   property) in data processing.
     _________________________________________________________________

References

[1] http://wiki.ffii.org/Cons0412En