Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure
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The Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure or FFII is a lobbying association based in Munich, Germany, and strongly against software patents. FFII initially took emphasis on electronic data processing as well as language and writing.
FFII's view is that software patents present a burden, not a benefit to society, as it is found by Economic studies such as
- An Empirical Look at software Patents (http://www.researchoninnovation.org/swpat.pdf)(PDF) Bessen (MIT) & Hunt (Federal Reserve Bank)
- The Software Patent Experiment (http://www.researchoninnovation.org/softpat.pdf)(PDF) Bessen & Hunt 2004.
and suggested by the
- Federal Trade Commission 2003 patent report (http://www.ffii.org.uk/swpat/ftc/ftc.html)
- and lots of other material (http://swpat.ffii.org/archive/mirror/impact/index.en.html).
FFII has been active on this front at least since 2000 when an attempt to change the European Patent Convention to legitimize software patents failed. In 2003, it strongly lobbied the European Parliament against the proposed Directive on the patentability of computer-implemented inventions.
FFII is the leading European NGO on this issue. Through its partnership with many other European organisations with the same goal, it has a reach across all nations of the EU.
FFII is directly supported e.g. by more than 1500 SME, many thousand software developers, tens of thousands of software users system administrators as well as a number of scientists, academics and economists.
FFII represents:
- more than 20.000 registered members
- more than 1.500 companies
- more than 2.000 CEOs of SMEs
- more than 50.000 European supporters (about 75.000 worldwide)
- more than 400.000[1] (http://petition.eurolinux.org) signatures for a software-patent free Europe.
FFII organizes Conferences about the topic in Brussels, about twice a year, the last one took place on April 14, 2004 (together with a demonstration of more than 400 people against software patents) and November 9-10, 2004. In Karlsruhe, FFII organized a demonstration of about 1000 people against software patents. See external link for details.
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Donors
Donors are increasing, and at the moment there are some major companies that have donated:
- €15,000 - Soros Foundation
- $10,000 - RedHat
- 5,000 DEM - SuSE
- 5,000 DEM - Infomatec
- $2,000 - Free Software Foundation
- €3,000 - Lars Mathiassen
Partners in Europe
EuroLinux, EFFI, ABUL, AFUL, FSF Europe, Vrijschrift, (see links to lists of organisations below)
See also
- Patent
- Software patent
- EU Directive on the Patentability of Computer-Implemented Inventions
- Harmut Pilch
- European Information, Communications and Consumer Electronics Technology Industry Associations (EICTA)
- Banana_republic#FFII
External links
- FFII main site (http://www.ffii.org/)
- http://webshop.ffii.org/ - 20 examples of software patents
- AEL wiki: main reasons why people are opposed to patenting of software (http://wiki.ael.be/index.php/TopReasonsWhyNoEpatents)
National sections:
- FFII UK section (http://www.ffii.org.uk/)
- FFII Polish section (http://www.ffii.org.pl/)
- FFII Swedish section (http://www.ffii.se/)
- FFII France (http://www.ffii.fr/)
- FFII Belgium (http://www.ffii.be/)
- FFII Galizia (http://galiza.ffii.org/)
FTC/DoJ hearings and the report
- FFII: some written submissions (http://swpat.ffii.org/papers/ftc02)
- FTC: and Intellectual Property Law and Policy in the Knowledge-Based Economy (http://www.ftc.gov/opp/intellect/Competition)
de:Förderverein für eine Freie Informationelle Infrastruktur e. V. nl:FFII