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FFII Web site taken down

Published: 02 Aug 2005 15:40 BST

The FFII Web site has been taken offline, after a German software company obtained a court order against the anti-patent campaign group.

The software company, called Nutzwerk, has been issued five provisional court orders and one preliminary injunction against the FFII, about allegedly false information that has been posted on the campaign group's Web site.

René Holzer, the chief executive of Nutzwerk, said on Tuesday that when the FFII did not respond to these court orders, it asked the organisation's hosting company to take the FFII Web site offline. A spokesman for the hosting company, Teamware, admitted that it had turned off the site, but was unable to provide any additional details.

The FFII did not say what if any changes it would make to its Web content, but claimed that Nutzwerk is trying to "cleanse the Net of critical reporting".

It is unclear what information the FFII was asked to remove by the Hamburg court injunction. Holzer claimed there are "more than a dozen" things that are untrue on the FFII Web site, but was unwilling to go into more detail about particular claims made by the FFII.

The FFII said on Monday that it has already found another hosting company, but the transfer of the FFII.org domain could take "up to 3 days". It advised visitors to go to nosoftwarepatents.com instead.

This is not the only such case that Nutzwerk is tied up in; it is also pursuing a case against German news Web site Heise.de over an article the site published in October last year.

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There will be further activation issues to watch out for as Microsoft plans to offer a similar service to independent software vendors whereby they can "control" licensing through activation and other measures similar to the Software Protection Platform.