Germany, the Trojan Horse of Bolkestein in the Council

The Italian and Danish delegates warned that the German delegate's amendments were meaningless. Yet, Germany, Poland and Latvia followed Bolkestein together with Germany, on whose position they had based their own opposition. Without Germany's leadership, Bolkestein could not have secured a qualified majority in the Council.

http://wiki.ael.be/index.php/V003.ogg

On May 12th and later, the German government had promised to oppose the Council paper or at least to abstain. It had built itself as the leader of the opposition against the Council

The german minister in charge, Brigitte Zypries, published an article on Heise online today in which she claims that her delegation obtained meaningful improvements which will prevent trivial patents. These claims lack even the slightest trace of truth.

All the German government achieved was to insert into Art 2b a requirement that a

The leading ministerial official of the German delegation, Hansjoerg Geiger, meanwhile told various news channels that the government was against broad and trivial patents. It is well known that the very regulations which the German government helped to push against the European Parliament systematically produce masses of broad and trivial patents. See

• Why Amazon One-Click Shopping is patentable under the JURI/Council proposal
• Why software patents are so trivial
• Zypries is under a certain pressure due to a coalition agreement between the Social Democrats and the Greens, which explicitely states that the field of software shall be governed by copyright and not by patents. The action of the current german government can, by all usual methods of interpretation, hardly be construed as conforming to the Coalition Agreement.
• From within the german government it is rumored that there has been a horse-trade to allow a breach of this obligations if in return pet projects of concerned politicians are pressed through the EU via the Council. The politicians from the coalition parties have kept conspicuously quiet. In the past similar agreements have prompted the german government to press coal subsidies through the EU via the Council in return for allowing some other countries to continue other subsidies. The minister of economics responsible for this brokering at the time, Werner Mueller, is now at the head of the coal agency RAG. The Council is well known to be a place for this kind of trading. Such trading helps the member state governments to maintain and enlarge their power at the expense of other EU institutions.
• Many other delegations also acted against intra-ministerial agreements and agreements with the parliamentary majority.
• The decision is not yet valid. It is a political agreement to turn the current paper into an A item which will then be nodded through at the next council meeting.