What The Hack: http://wiki.whatthehack.org

Pratiques douteuse pour tenter de couler la FFII: http://nutzwerk.ffii.org/index.en.html (disponible bientot car la societe en question a fait une lettre de menace a l'ISP de la FFII. Cet ISP n'a rien verifie et a coupe leur Web site & DNS).

Voici le texte:

29th July 2005 -- a German Internet company today claimed to have shut down the FFII Internet server and to have succeded in litigating FFII to death. Nutzwerk GmbH, also known as SaferSurf.com, issued the fifth in a series of libelous press releases against FFII. There is however some truth to the story: Nutzwerk is trying hard to push FFII into bankruptcy by obtaining urgent injunctions on the same matter in several local courts all across Germany, and by doing everything possible to maximise the costs for FFII. Today's story reflects Nutzwerk's wishful thinking as well as some real problems with the current German system of legal liability for contents published on the Internet.

Website authors and Internet service providers in Germany have for years been living in an atmosphere of legal insecurity, generated by a system of civil law that makes it easy for litigious companies to inflict costs on them. Nutzwerk has taken advantage of this to cleanse the Net of critical reporting. Nutzwerk has good reasons for doing so. On the one hand, they have generated an enormous hype around rather weak offers, with the help of big media and governmental patent agencies who have been promoting them as an example of a successful SME based on software patents. On the other hand they have become known for deceptive diagnosis software, for fake advertisement banner clicks generated from typo domains such as yaho.co.uk, and for massive Google spamming with link farms containing keywords such as "kostenloser Sex" ("free sex") and "Scheiß Juden" ("f*cking jews"). It is crucial for Nutzwerk to be able to fill search engines with their own press releases and to bring the unwanted informations down as far as possible.

When Nutzwerk attacked the FFII with its first in junction last autumn, they complained that FFII was damaging their reputation because of the high visibility of FFII's pages in Google. Since then Nutzwerk has threatened to sue people who place links to this documentation, but through all their litigiousness, including a lawsuit against Heise.de, the ranking of the FFII's documentation of Nutzwerk has only climbed higher and higher.

You can find Nutzwerk's new press release at

  • http://www.nutzwerk.de/media/releases/05_07_29_ffii.html
  • http://www.pressetext.at/pte.mc?pte=050729046

and more information via

       http://nutzwerk.ffii.org/index.en.html

-- Hartmut Pilch, FFII.org, Munich Office +498918979927, Brussels +3227396262 Protect Innovation, not Monopolies http://www.economic-majority.com/