Against the decision of European Parliament, the EU Council has approved the software patent directive against its own rules.

This was a clear example of how big business lobbies can thwart the democratic process, in this case threatening local IT innovation and opening the door to ridiculous US-style intellectual property lawsuits.

This is a sad day for the European economic sphere, the IT industry, and the Open Source movement. Lessig comments:

This struggle continues to astonish me. There's no good economic evidence that software patents do more good than harm. That's the reason the US should reconsider its software patent policy.

But why Europe would voluntarily adopt a policy that will only burden its software developers and only benefit US interests is beyond me.

But maybe there would still be time to do something about this?