Thousands of sites are joining the FFII online-demo against the new attempts to legalize software patents in Europe. Worldwide sites like the GNU Project are closed with a protest frontpage the same way as a lot of european Indymedia nodes (Portugal, Galiza, Canarias, Madiaq, Madrid, Barcelona, Paris, Germany, Belgium, UK...) calling to the april 14 Brussels demonstration.

The purpose is to mobilize the entire society decrypting and broadcasting the techno&legal trap wich the patent lawyers are trying to use to legalize the EPO's granted abusive patents. Even beeing covered by copyright laws, the Council of Europe is now pussing for unlimited software patentability ignoring the european parliament's democratic decission that avoids software patents: that decision was taken with the support of hundreds of thousands of citizens (sign now!), thousands of SMEs and scientists and hundreds of economists.

The software describes methods like "adding two numbers" wich are abstractions so generics as the expresion "joining two pieces". Software patentability prevents and limits software i nnovation because any new piece of code could be affected by any of those abusive patents like "progress bar" or "user interface" only usable with permission of their patent "owner". The needing of checking the 'patent state' of any new idea against EPO turns software development in a patent minefield, and this affects all software developers from GPL to proprietary ones, regardless of being gratis or not.

Diversity, undeveloped countries and minorized cultures are particularly disadvantaged by insolidarious and disruptive systems such as that of software patents. No corporation is interested in giving us software in our languages, or ways to adding our fundamental esences to construct those transnational flows of alternative communication wich demonstrated their effectivenes in surpassing the mediatic silence and the official lies when events like the Prestige Oil Spill comes to our lives. Those flows are basically constructed with different tastes of non-patented software, and this is the reason because software patents give a few multinational corporations enormous additional power and promote unproductive concentration in the industry, thereby removing development opportunities from individuals, small entities and democratic states.

So join us saying NO TO SOFTWARE PATENTS IN EUROPE next april 14 at Brusells!