FSFE in the news
I’ve been quoted in the Danish newspaper Arbejderen (“The Labourer”) under the headline “IT Employees Launch Campaign Against the Patent Court“. The campaign is about the upcoming referendum on the Danish accession to the new EU-wide Unified Patent and the related Unified Patent Court. The work of the FSFE and especially our Fellowship group is mentioned.
It is very important to campaign for a “no” in this referendum, since the Unified Patent will make the current problems with software patents from the European Patent Office much worse. If Denmark votes no, its businesses will be at least partially shielded from European-wide enforcement of software patents. The campaign is organized by PROSA and the IT-Political Association of Denmark.
This is more relevant than ever, as the EPO now openly admits that “technical software” can be patented.
The quote is:
Carsten Agger is active in the IT-Political Association of Denmark and in Open Space Aarhus, an association of people interested in technology[1].
He is also a coordinator in the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) which fights for the right to develop and distribute software freely.
This Friday, the FSFE joined a campaign to ask all candidates for the upcoming elections for the European Parliament to join a pact which states that free software is a common good which is worth fighting for.
If you want to read the rest of the article, I propose you use Google Translate, as I don’t have the time to translate all of it.
Tonight, there’s going to be a public meeting in Aarhus to launch the new campaign against software patents and the Unified Patent. I hope there’s going to be a lot of people and that we can get the “no”. That could also help get the movement against software patent going in all of Europe.
Our local group in Aarhus will contribute as much to the campaign as it can. The patent court and the referendum will be the subject of our next fellowship meeting on February 20.
Notes:
[1]: Also called a HACKERSPACE. That’s the term we prefer.
[2]: Actually, the original article states that the FSFE launched that campaign. This is wrong and is not what I told the journalist. APRIL has launched it, the FSFE and specifically our local group wants to join it. The journalist has now fixed this in the online edition.