[Discussioni] Aggiornamento questione brevetti, [Fwd: What's Hot Issue 4: The trialogue]

Lun 6 Giu 2005 15:13:44 CEST

Come si può vedere, dall'Italia le notizie sono deludenti.

-------- Forwarded Message --------
Subject: What's Hot Issue 4: The trialogue
Date: Mon, 6 Jun 2005 00:39:24 +0300

(Cross-posted; Reply-To is set to an address which will just eat the
email. So you must choose the recipient if you reply; don't group
reply; change the subject line if you reply.)

Editorial
---------

I write What's Hot for a purpose, and this is to make you less
confused, or to make you know that to be confused is to be normal and
that you should be enjoying it. But my ultimate goal is to help you
help us. It is a lot of work to write this newsletter, and I do it
although there's a multitude of other useful things I could be doing
instead.  If you want to repay some of that, try to do something.
There are suggestions in the section "What you must do".

This issue contains an appendix with some necessary background. If you
don't have clear understanding of the terms "Juri", "rapporteur",
"shadow", "Rocard", and "Kauppi", please go and read it now, and then
return back here to continue.

BTW, the previous issue had a "What's cold" section. Some people
interpreted that as "What's bad". There was no such intention. By
"cold" I meant things that were originally hot but are now cooling
down because they are in the past. I renamed that section to:

What's cooling down
-------------------

These are the recent events:

1 June      FFII & CCIA conference, EP and Renaissance Hotel, Brussels.
            http://swpat.ffii.org/events/2005/bxl0601/.

2 June      Greens EFA & FSF conference on swpats and FLOSS, EP,
            Brussels.
            http://www.greens-efa.org/en/agenda/detail.php?id=1726

2 June      EPP SME hearing.

2 June      Demonstration, Brussels. http://demo.ael.be/.

The FFII conference wasn't bad. The presentations were good, there was
nice information material including a fabulous colourful economic
majority leaflet, and the attendance was good. The Greens conference
was also nice. Among others, there was Stallman and Alan Cox.  The
demo was a demo. It wasn't much advertised, so it wasn't particularly
great.  Around 100 people. Finally, the EPP SME hearing was fair. Some
people here are disappointed because they think it could have gone
better, but I think it was OK. The propatent guys made impressive
speeches, but it becomes clearer and clearer that CII=software.

In any case, rarely is an event any major success or major
catastrophe. Usually it just adds a little bit. All the events, the
lobbying, the advertisements, and so on, are building the thing,
little by little. And while we are busy building, the propatent guys
are also busy building.

Anyway, let's look at the future.

Important pending events
------------------------

NEW     6 June  JURI meeting. Nothing about swpat on the agenda, but
                this is the last JURI meeting before their vote, and
                it's not impossible that they'd discuss something.

    20-21 June  JURI committee votes on software patents

NEW 22-23 June  EICTA European Innovation Day. A big proswpat event
                at the European Parliament and the Rennaissance Hotel
                (which is close to the European Parliament).

    5-6 July    European parliament plenary discussion and vote

More events: http://wiki.ffii.org/SwpatpenmiEn

What's hot
----------

While there are no news about analyzed amendments
(http://www.ffii.org/amend/) and the economic majority
(http://www.economic-majority.com/), don't forget these two things.
They are always hot.

Hot events of the week are the "compromise" amendments and the
trialogue. I have no clear understanding about any of the two.
However, I understand that the "compromise" amendments are proposed by
the rapporteur as a compromise between all proposed amendments. But
please, don't take everything I say too seriously.

The trialogue is like a dialogue, but with three parties
participating: Commission, Council, and European Parliament. I have a
very rough understanding of this thing, but essentially it goes like
this: the co-decision procedure is, in theory, something where the
three decide together what they will do. In practice, however, as
we've seen, only the Commission and Council decide, and they just
ignore the Parliament. Now since the parliament is being tough, the
Commission and Council say "ok, let's discuss it", and this is the
trialogue.

Now you might be tempted to think that the trialogue is a good thing
because the Commission and Council consider actually discussing with
the Parliament. However, the trialogue is not a formal part of the
procedure. What does this mean? It means that the governments act
outside of any procedures. For example, they won't consult or notify
their national parliaments. So this informal trialogue is a trick in
order to avoid the formal trialogue of conciliation, which will be
harder for them.  In this trialogue, the Commission and Council are
only expected to explain which amendments they cannot possibly accept,
and place pressure to the EP to do what they want. With only one month
to go, they couldn't possibly do anything else.

What you must do
----------------

1) Contact members of your national parliament. Ask them to send a
   clear message in favour of the first reading amendments. Ask them
   to ask their governments to stop the trialogue.

2) Contact companies and get them to sign economic-majority.com. Help
   them prepare testimonies. For more detailed instructions and
   support, ask em-testimony at ffii.org.

3) Get SMEs and experts to come to Brussels during the remaining weeks.
   For more detailed instructions and support, ask brussels at
   ffii.org.

Appendix: Background for the clueless
-------------------------------------

The European Parliament consists of 732 members, which we call MEPs
(Members of the European Parliament).  A committee is a subset of the
732 members. For example, the Legal Affairs Committee, nicknamed JURI,
consists of 49 MEPs. There is a number of Committees in the
Parliament, and each one takes care of certain issues. The software
patent directive is JURI's job. So JURI is the Committee that studies
the issue, makes a proposal, takes the proposal to the rest of the
European Parliament, who make their final decision in plenary.
Plenary means "all 732 members", or so I think.

Even 49 people is too many, and so within a committee certain people
are assigned specific issues. One MEP, called the rapporteur, is
responsible for each issue. The rapporteur for the swpat directive is
Michel Rocard (French PSE). In order to understand what "French PSE"
means, we have to talk about countries and political groups.

I hope you have clear understanding of what a country is, so let's
talk about the groups only. Groups are something like political
parties. The only difference is that groups are international, so they
are actually sets of parties. A political group consists of certain
national parties from different countries. So, to take an example, the
Greek party of PASOK is a member of the PSE political group. There are
7 political groups in the European Parliament:

Group       GUE/NGL  Greens/EFA  PSE  ALDE  EPP-DE  UEN      I/D
Members     41          42       201   88    268    27       36

There are also 29 MEPs that are not attached to any group. Now I've
_tried_ to put this in some kind of order from left to right above,
but don't take it very seriously because what does left and right mean
anyway? And I've put I/D a little bit separately because they are
mixed. Anyway, if you go to http://www.europarl.eu.int/ and choose
"Members of the European Parliament", you'll see a very nice table and
you can check out the groups to which the parties of your country
belong, so you'll get a better idea.

By the way, it was thought that this is not confusing enough, so
EPP-DE, which is usually communicated as merely EPP, is frequently
written PPE instead, and PSE is sometimes seen as SPE. Depends on
whether you like the English or the French more. So you can frequently
ignore the order of the letters.

But let's go back to our committee. Except for the rapporteur, who
heads the issue, there is also one MEP responsible for each political
group. These guys are called "shadow rapporteurs" or simply "shadows".
PSE does not have a shadow, because the rapporteur is PSE. The rest of
the groups have the following shadows:

EPP     Piia-Noora Kauppi (Finland)
ALDE    Diana Wallis (UK) and Andrew Duff (UK)
Greens  Eva Lichtenberger (Austria)
GUE     Ilda Figueiredo (Portugal)
I/D     -
UEN     Marcin Libicki (Poland)

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