From phm@a2e.de  Sat Jun  9 15:46:15 2001
From: phm@a2e.de (PILCH Hartmut)
Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2001 16:46:15 +0200 (CEST)
Subject: [Patents] free sw removed from german website due to US swpat threats
Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.31.0106091646060.5316-100000@querty.oas.a2e.de>

Under

 http://www.heise.de/newsticker/data/daa-07.06.01-002/
 http://www.fh-furtwangen.de/~dersch
 http://www.ipix.com
 http://www.cityscope.de/pp3n/index.html
 http://listserv.fh-furtwangen.de/cgi-bin/lwgate/cgi/lwgate-en-proj.cgi/PROJ-IMIM/archives/proj-imim.archive.0106/date/article-21.html

you can find some info in german about the latest development about the
Dersch v. iPIX case, see also

	http://swpat.ffii.org/vreji/pikta/xrani/ipix/
	(to be updated)

A German math professor has backed down by removing his free image
processing software from the web at least temporarily due to threats from
iPIX Inc., a company that has pursued swpats agressively through US
courts.

The strange thing about this is that Dersch is backing down although the
claims from iPIX are based only on US patents.  It seems that even without
further extensions of the Hague Convention jurisdictions are already
sufficiently blurred to allow US patents to terrorise European software
developpers who are only publishing web pages without pursuing any
business activities in the US.

--
Hartmut Pilch                                           http://phm.ffii.org/
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation	      http://swpat.ffii.org/
79100 signatures against software patents     http://petition.eurolinux.org/










