Mueller's "No Lobbyists As Such - The War over Software Patents in the European Union" now available
Florian Mueller, the founder of the award-winning
NoSoftwarePatents.com campaign, has published his memoir-style book,
"No Lobbyists As Such - The War over Software Patents in the European
Union", on the Internet.
On 377 pages, Mueller tells the story of the legislative process
that ended in July last year with a landslide vote of the European
Parliament against a proposal for a software patent directive.
This is an excerpt from the introduciton to the book by Florian Mueller, chronicling the events leading up to one of the most siginificant legislative decisions in European law this decade and of immense impact to our industry.
"On July 6, 2005, the world of politics turned upside down. Big money was dealt a blow.
The European Parliament threw out legislation that the world's largest
IT companies badly wanted. Under the pretext of protecting inventors
against plagiarists, it would have handed those giants sweeping powers
over Europe's high-tech markets. An electronic roll-call vote thwarted
the wicked plan in a matter of seconds, but that decision was preceded
by years of intense fighting."
Readers of this blog will be aware
I follow this - I'll never forget that later that day following my post to the blog we suffered the london bomb attack and lost
Colin Morley.
Anyhow, I highly recommend you read
this book.