[Fsfe-ie] Latest on patents, JURI not involved, my mistakes

Ciaran O'Riordan ciaran at member.fsf.org
Wed Sep 3 19:13:11 CEST 2003


I was talking to Alex Macfie on the phone earlier, he's
the vice prez of FFII, so his info should be pretty solid.

He says the proposal has not been handed back to the JURI,
the vote has simply been delayed.  The previous set of
amendments have been binned and MEPs have been asked to
rethink their amendments.  The hope is that the MEPs will
work together to produce fewer, better amendments.

The final list of amendments won't be available until about
48 hours before the vote, so we have to tell our MEPs what
*type* of amendments we want.  He recommended not pointing
MEPs to the UEN amendments[0] that I posted.  Instead he
said we should use the text of some of those amendments as
examples when telling our MEPs what we want.

[0] http://www.compsoc.com/~coriordan/docs/uen_amendments/

The PPE party is the largest party in the EP and it is mostly
pro-directive.  Fine Gail MEPs are all part of this party so
it's particularly important to get them on our side.  We
already have Avril Doyle, we need the other three too.

Alex said he'd mail two documents to me, I'll make them public
as soon as I get them.  One was some good amendments by
someone, they other was a doc that McCarthy has been circulating.
It may be this doc:

LWN.net today had a story about Arlene McCarthy, she's produced
a small FAQ:
http://vrijschrift.org/swpat/press/final_factsheet1092003.pdf
It's important to let our MEPs know that this is a pack of lies
but for us to be believable, we have to know the directive and
the arguments inside out.

He mentioned that the amendments from Castro/Crowley are a bit
messy and kinda contradict themselves in places.  He doesn't
know what amendment 13 was meant to mean.  It seems they jumbled
together parts of three amendment sets that were supposed to be
separate.

So what's to be done?
We should probably do nothing until we feel really confident
that we understand the text of the issues.  (We know the issues,
but we must debate them using EU texts.)

A voting list, or a voting-type list should be sent to our MEPs
before the next big vote.  The date is not set but it is very
likely to be Sept 22nd.

He said the FFII amendment proposal pages were a good place
to point MEPs to.  They should give a good picture of what
we want.  I'm not sure I agree with this, the FFII site can
sound quite angry at times, maybe we should mirror and
editted copy.

So, probably the best thing we could do would be to make a
list of our own amendments (stolen wholesale from others),
and pass that list on to our MEPs as a voting guide.  (and
include a justification for the merits of each amendment.)

Ciaran O'Riordan


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