FFII's fictious anti-patent agenda

-> [ Astroturfing 2005 | Media | News ]

23rd June 2005 -- A news article claims that FFII "generally wants the current European patent system abolished". This is not true and the author was informed, but the article remains unchanged. Amid a climate of big budget lobbying by a group of large corporations with big patent department, journalists should be particularly careful about maintaining some level of integrity in the media.

Update: the article has been corrected in the mean time.

W. David Gardner wrote in an Informationweek/Techweb article

• "The European Commission, the European Patent Office and the European Council all want to enforce patents," said Erik Josefsson, a Brussels-based spokesman for the Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure (FFII), which generally wants the current European patent system abolished. "The only group saying 'no' to patents is Parliament."

He was immidiately asked to correct the false claims, and did so after a few days. The main focus of the article is an astroturf event by the so-called Campaign for Creativity in Brussels. The title "Heated Demonstrations Precede Europe's Vote On Software Patents" reflects that.

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W. David Gardner was criticised before by a reader of Techweb: "There's lies, damn lies, statistics, and W. David Gardner"

Apparently there is a former intelligence officer David W. Gardner