Summary: Business interests take over Europe and European politicians play along with negative patents agenda

TECHRIGHTS has been utterly disappointed with the policies set in place by the European Commission in recent years. Not only policies disappoint but also procurement irregularities and misinformation that comes from people like Barroso, who parrot some other lawyers' propaganda. Barroso is a laywer, just like many of his peers in politics, and he repeats the patent lawyers' disinformation which piggybacks SMEs just like Microsoft's front group Association for Competitive Technology.

Watch what President Barroso carelessly said about the abomination that Commissioner Barnier most typically promotes:

Research and innovation hold the key to Europe's future competitiveness. This is another area where acting now will pay rich dividends in the future. We have tabled important proposals to help SMEs to access finance and to support innovative companies, for example through a European venture capital regime. And I need not repeat how important a swift agreement on a European patent is - after a thirty year wait, it is time to deliver.

Utter nonesense. They are using language diversity as an excuse to expand the scope and number of patents or, as the FFII's president put it, "The patent system does not care about language diversity" as shown in this new video desribed as follows:

It costs €2,000 in the US, and up to €40,000 in Europe. The single EU patent should make things simpler and cheaper, but its implementation is complicated.

Now, consider another case of unnecessary discrimination. The FFII's president asks a reputed MEP: "European citizens depends on Microsoft codec to watch what is going on in the European Parliament?"

The "automated translation is a discrimination of languages," he insists. We agree. And Google participates in this.

There are other reasons to be upset at the European authorities. To quote this new example from EDRI, thre is still failure even on standards:

The European standardisation system is being revamped. In the European Parliament, the Consumer Committee (IMCO) under its rapporteur Lara Comi (EPP, Italy) is deliberating a proposal from the European Commission. Parliament members face tricky regulatory decisions on the standardisation of services and participation of small enterprises.

These issues overshadow a ground-breaking novelty: an official "recognition" for specifications from private sector consortia in the field of information and communication technologies (ICT). Those "recognised ICT specifications" are not "standards" (developed by standards organisations) but still could be legally referenced by tenders for public procurement.

European policy is being polluted by businss interests. Lobbying is very widespread in Europe, not just in the US (notoriously so). Let's inform fellow citizens of Europe so that decision-making is not done solely by corporatate leaders who pass gentle bribes to politicians. ACTA's failure to pass in many European nations was due to protests, i.e. the public rising up. ⬆