648-14

Those are the numbers by which the European Parliament smacked down the long-lived and wrong-headed attempt to adopt a USPTO-style tax on innovation. Everyone’s already reported this, but I will too, just because it makes me happy to write this, but also because there’s a take-away: Sometimes politics works. The patent vampires tried to sneak this one through the back rooms, and it was good old-fashioned lobbying and pamphleteering and evangelizing and hollering that stopped them. I’m feeling refreshingly un-cynical.