EFFI strike force attended
“Software Patents: From Legal Wordings to Economic Reality” event near and inside
EU parliament in early May 2003. Our two day – one night session was quite fruitful.
We met the main guys behind software patent opposition in Europe and United States.
We were also positively surprised of the huge popularity the event officially arranged by
the Green Party and Radicals drew at the EU parliament building the other day. There must have been a couple
hundred of people attending. Obviously, most of the attendees were young tech people aware of the issue and
critical to patents but there were also MEPs and people supporting more broad patenting.
Richard Stallman held the most applauded speeches – as expected. However, it is difficult to judge the
impact of the event. At least some MEPs seem to know quite thorougly what is at stake and that there
are different views around. – The night between went meeting with new people and hanging around with
SOT’s Santeri Kannisto.
We also met with EDRI fellows arranging
a press conference with some MEPs about passenger data transfers to the United
States. After all the buzz we had a very pleasent “EDRI-lunch” together and
then headed back home again.
Some pics from the two days:
From left: Hartmut Pilch (FFII), Piia-Noora Kauppi (MEP), Lawrence Lessig (Stanford) and Ville Oksanen (EFFI).
From left: Mikko Välimäki (EFFI), Reinier Bakels (IVIR) and Brian Kahin (Michigan).
RMS says: “I like it” and one more infamous EFFI-shirt transfers its owner.
EDRI press conference. From left:
Marco Cappato (MEP), Maurice Wessling (EDRI), Kathalijne Buitenweg (MEP) and Cedric Laurant (EPIC).
Story: Mikko Välimäki