Dear folks,

In February 2002, the European Commission proposed a
directive that would legalise software patents. However, the
European Parliament decided in its Plenary Vote of 24th
September 2003 to fix all the loopholes in this proposal and
explicitly banned software patents.

Currently, the European Council of Ministers is discussing
this directive. Their internal working party proposes to
simply discard all clarifying amendments from the
Parliament. They want to make everything patentable.

That is not an option Europe is willing to accept. We showed
them this on 27 August 2003. We will show them again on 14
April 2004.

If you do not want Open Source softwares like HTTrack to be
illegal in the very near future because of patent reasons,
please protest with us against software patents in Europe.
Software patents are not only a major threat for the Open
Source communauty, but also for our freedom.

More info:
<http://demo.ffii.org/>

Xavier Roche
(author of HTTrack Website Copier)
8 April 2004