How to topple the Council Cardhouse on 2004-05-18
Purpose
When on tuesday 2004-05-18 the irish presidency
Establish Connections
One of the biggest obstacles is that most officials, especially those from the new member states, wrongly believe that there is a strong consensus behind the council proposal. In fact there is widespread resistance, but isolation of the resistants must be overcome.
- inform consilium-help at ffii org (or phm or blasum or bkaindl or jheald or jmaebe at ffii org) about any direct or indirect contacts to participants in the Council meeting who might be willing to help
Call on Players
The Council presidency has prepared a "compromise document" for unlimited patentability which is extreme in every way, especially in the way in which it tries to conceal its real contents, see
Some of the responsible politicians have meanwhile become aware of this.
This gives us an opportunity to get the proposal postponed on May 18th. All that is needed seems to be that one of the ministers should, when asked by the Irish presidency, say that "yes, this proposal needs discussion" and then poke some fun at the rhetorics used in it (e.g. in Art 4A and 5(2)).
With some effort it should be possible for 1 informed minister to make the whole cardhouse fall apart.
There is even a good chance for such a minister to appear "constructive" at the meeting. E.g. by removing Art 5(2) and adopting the german proposal for Art 2b, it might be possible to create a basis for a further reading by the parliament -- not a good directive, but at least something that does not ruin the directive project altoghether. And even something that the Irish Presidency can achieve in its term, if that is so important.
We are am now trying to put together a kind of memorandum for officials who would like to take this path, and I am putting interested officials or activists from various national ministeries into BCC or into a mail alias cons040518. Please tell cons040518 at ffii org of any email addresses we can put there.
If it helps you can ask for submitting national signatories of petition.eurolinux.org to national minsters (done so far in es,pt,nl,be,se), mail blasum(att)ffii.org or call/sms him at +49-174-7313590 (response time as fast as possible).
Background material
Maebe analysis http://www.elis.ugent.be/~jmaebe/swpat/councilanalysis/paper-en.pdf
Beauprez analysis http://bh.udev.org/filez/swpat/beaupre/compliance.pdf
Council proposal text http://www.vetmed.uni-muenchen.de/tmp/directive_council.doc (text-only:) http://www.vetmed.uni-muenchen.de/tmp/directive_council.txt
Council proposal comments http://www.vetmed.uni-muenchen.de/tmp/directive_council_comments.doc (text-only:) http://www.vetmed.uni-muenchen.de/tmp/directive_council_comments.txt
