[ILUG] Irish fight against software patents

[Peter Toft]

On Wed, 18 Oct 2000, Justin Mason wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I'm writing from ILUG, the Irish Linux User's Group.   We're currently
> starting up a campaign to stop Ireland from supporting the EPO in their
> bid to legalise software patents in Europe, and hopefully get our MEPs and
> other representatives to make efforts to block the EPO's move.
> 
> Our current site (still under development!!) is on a Wiki at
> http://taint.org/twiki/bin/view/Main/IrishSoftwarePatents -- it'll be
> moving to linux.ie soon. (we've just started the campaign.)
> 
> Now, we would like to petition Irish linux users on this issue, but it
> would be easier, and more effective, if we can use petition.eurolinux.org
> -- it's already been much better publicised than we could do, and has
> already gained 1000s of Irish signatures.
> 
> Is there any way we could do this effectively?  Could we gain access to
> the eurolinux petition database of Irish signatures, so we can say that
> "the Eurolinux petition has xxxx signatures of Irish users"?
> 
> Regarding privacy issues:
> 
>   1. as far as I know we don't need direct access to the data; if you
>   could provide a URL that filters the current DB to only show Irish
>   users, that's fine.
> 
>   2. a figure of the total # of Irish signatures would be good too.
> 
>   3. only Irish signatures are needed; we can point to Eurolinux for
>   European-wide figures.

I know that the Irish signatures can be extracted. It
has been done with the Danish signatures, which were
extracted from the database. Actually if you use
http://petition.eurolinux.org we have a double win
situtation. The Irish votes can be registered *now* and
the Eurolinux petition gets more people registered -
which is super!

GO GO GO !!! We have 1.5 month left before EPO has the
grand final round. Note also that EU will have an open
hearing starting one of these days on software patents.
The URL will presumably be
http://europa.eu.int/comm/internal_market/en/intprop/indprop/index.htm
Lets keep that in mind - and go for it.

Best regards

-- 
Peter Toft, Ph.D. [pto at sslug.dk] http://www.sslug.dk/~pto

"You don't win a battle by asking, `Will we win?' 
You win it by doing your best to win"
- Richard M Stallman

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