2005-07-05 Wuermeling speech in Plenary

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Joachim Wuermeling MEP portrays himself as guided by naive dogmatic motives, asserts that this vote is about assuring the supremacy of the creative mind over money.

Transcript of english translation, speech was in german Source stream: http://www.dd.chalmers.se/~klingber/parl/parl0705.rm

Thank you president, commissioner, my dear collegues.

Now, in this room we have talked about the importance of inventiveness, the spirit of the age, the aspect of assets of Europe and globalisation. That's been said so often, but equally important,(Of course We have to keep that spirit. Butit is equally important) that out ideas should not be stolen by others.

Millions of euros can be invested in an invention and then three monts later someone can imitate it, put it on the market, and the inventor does not get a just reward for his efforts, or her efforts. So we must protect the weak. We must protect inventors against those who have power in the market, and the patent settles the fight between the power of the mind and the power of the market, and it does so in favor of the power of the mind, irrespective of whether the mind is that of a big or a small business.

So my dear collegues, as we have listened thorugh this debate today and previous weeks, I have been very dissatisfied. We have had a sort of overheated atmosphere, We have had a lot of lobbying, and to be honest we are bound to see,allthough we have now reached the second reading, basicall there are still a whole lot of things we have to decide on: possessions, forms of words and the effects of these we can not really assess, at this stage. And there have been a number of amendments, many of them on article 10, and it is very diffucult to forsee what their effects might be. I have the impression that this issue is not yet right for decision, and we should really thing about whether we shouldn't extend this legislature procedure by rejecting the proposal. I think that might be the most sensible position we might take at this stage Thank you.