Association for a Free Information Infrastructure
| Association for a Free Information Infrastructure eV (FFII) |
|
|---|---|
| legal form | nonprofit organization |
| founding | 1999 |
| Seat | Munich |
| purpose | Popular education and consumer protection by making information infrastructure accessible |
| Chair | Benjamin Henrion |
| Members | over 1000 |
| Website | https://ffii.org/ |
The Association for a Free Information Infrastructure eV , also Foundation for a Free Information Infrastructure , FFII for short , is a non-profit and non-partisan association registered in Munich that advocates free standards and software.
The aim of the FFII is the creation and use of freely implementable standards so that open source and free software of small companies cannot be excluded from the IT market in the competition for the best software only because of their low market power.
The association supports software users and system administrators in their efforts to create free software and open content is also promoted by software developers and medium-sized software companies . In this context, the FFII, together with other European non-governmental organizations, organizes events and conferences in Brussels , Berlin , Munich , Strasbourg and other European cities.
The association has an open participation structure , communication via open mailing lists and a support base of more than 50,000 people. He also works closely with data protection organizations such as the working group on data retention .
The founder of the German association is the sinologist and software developer Hartmut Pilch . There are sister organizations in other European countries.
Software patents in the European Union
Amendment to the European Patent Convention in 2000
The main activity is aimed at ensuring freedom of programming. According to the prevailing opinion of the open content community and many independent, independent and medium-sized software producers, this freedom was in danger through a new EU directive on the patentability of software until 2005.
In 2000, the FFII, together with other organizations to protect open content software, lobbied against an amendment to the European Patent Convention. The aim of the change in European patent law was to enable software patents.
Another advance in 2002
After the amendment of the European patent convention failed, software patent-friendly lobby associations concentrated on enforcing their interests through the EU Commission . As a result, at the beginning of 2002 the EU Commission under Frits Bolkestein introduced a corresponding patent-friendly EU directive into the legislative process. This guideline also had the aim of granting all software comprehensive patent protection.
This proposal of the EU directive on software patenting was then rejected in the further legislative process by the European Parliament (by a relative majority of MPs).
Despite the vote of the EU Parliament, the key players in the newly constituted EU Commission are still trying to enforce the concerns of the lobbyists of the large software companies. The EU Commission refused to discuss the law in the EU Parliament. Instead, a more far-reaching EU directive was introduced again, in which individual members of the EU Commission acted contrary to instructions and thus ignored the parliamentary will of the European People's Assembly.
For the rejection of this second EU directive by the EU parliament, an even larger majority of the people's representatives was required (absolute majority of all members of parliament).
The petition for a software patent-free European Union, co-initiated by the association , received over 310,000 signatures in March 2005.