Well, less than an hour after my email was sent, Peter had replied with a full letter. Whether created there and then, pulled from a filing cabinet, or written previously and just stuck in the post, it’s impressive. I think I’ll have to review my policy of using dead trees as my primary communication with politicians.
His response is interesting, and is the most moderate I’ve seen. He (and the rest of his Labour colleges) is taking what seems on paper to be a sensible position.
- A US style software patenting system must not be created
- Software products as such should not be patentable
- Open source “must be allowed to flourish”
- Any patents granted should not be used just to squeeze out small companies
These are admirable goals, and if they are all achieved, I think it will mitigate most of my fears (and the fears of most non-extremist anti-patent developers).
The one thing that concerns me is a statement saying that Labour is supporting an effort to create a defence fund to protect UK companies against litigation from dominant players. Whilst it seems a sensible idea on the surface, it raises the spectre that the directive will be ambiguous enough to allow such litigation to proceed past initial hearings.
He closes by claiming he will be following the progress of the directive closely. We who are opposed to the current directive must ensure we keep putting our position in front of the politicians – else they may be won over by the far better funded pro-patent lobby.
Well, I didn’t get any new replies today, so I’ve sent the following “please don’t ignore me” message to the tardy MEPs.
Regarding the Directive on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions
Dear MEP,
I’m writing concerning a letter I sent to you on Friday 8th April
regarding the proposed “Directive on the Patentability
of Computer-Implemented Inventions”. I know that you’re very busy, so I
understand why I’ve not yet received a reply. However, this directive
has now entered the three month adoption/amendment/rejection period
within the parliament, and I wanted to make sure that you received the
letter, and that the content had not been overlooked.
I would not normally bother you after only two weeks, but the current
propositions impact on our IT industry would be devastating. I urge you
to read both my objections and those of huge numbers of real developers
within the UK and EU. I hope you’ll then agree that the directive cannot
be allowed to pass in its current form.
Yours sincerely,
Adam Wright
adamw@archgrove.co.uk
As always, I’ll post here with any responses I get.
For the virtually noone who’s interested, I’ve still yet to recieve any replies from Labour or the Lib Dems. The Conservatives “reply” also hardly counts.
As the legislation has now begun to wind through it’s second reading, I’ll send an email reminder to all the non-respondents tomorrow (and post the text here).
Daniel Hannan, Conservative MEP for South East England, has responded to my letter regarding software patents. Unfortunately, he doesn’t even read it, saying that because the Conservatives disagreed with the proportional representation system used at the EU elections, they’ve decided to subdivide the South East into 4 constituencies, and sending a letter to him was not appropriate. He’s passed my letter on to Richard Ashworth, who’ll now have two copies.
Given that there’s no information on this anywhere on the Europarl website, it seems a rather churlish thing to do - “We didn’t want the system, so rather than play fair with it, we’ll just be petulant and pretend it runs the way we want anyway”.
Ah well, I can at least hope that Mr Ashworth will read the content, and pass the contents onto Mr Hannan.
Well, this weblog’s been up barely a week, and already the comment spam has begun. Why these lowlife think it’s clever to mass spam private websites I don’t know. I do know they’re idiotic enough to not even put a valid URL in their junk message, so it is entirely pointless.
I don’t want to turn on comment moderation, so I’ll strugle on manually deleting them until it gets too bad. Until then, I’ve got some abuse@spammingidiot.com mails to send.
