Programmers Protest Copyright Litigation

Programmers Protest Copyright Litigation

Picketers March On Lotus; Apple Is Next

June Gross
Computer Reseller News

May 29, 1989

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Hard-working programmers came out of the shadows and into the streets last week to protest the growing number of copyright lawsuits.

The fledgling group that sponsored the march, the League for Programming Freedom, led an estimated 150 to 200 marchers on the half-mile trek from The Massachusetts Institute of Technology to Lotus Development Corp. headquarters here.

Lotus has "look and feel" lawsuits pending against Paperback Software Inc. and Mosaic Software Inc.

Local group spokesman and march organizer Richard Stallman said developers have contacted colleagues on the West Coast who are interested in picketing another major target of programmer wrath, Apple Computer Inc., which has sued Microsoft Corp. and Hewlett-Packard Co. for violating its rights to the Macintosh user interface.

Among the marchers were developers from The Saddlebrook Corp., Bitstream Inc., Thinking Machines, MIT's Artificial Intelligence Lab and Northeastern University.

Brian Kocher, president of the Association for Computer Machinery, a major national developer trade group, also took part in the march through Cambridge. At an ACM conference next week, Kocher plans to recommend that the organization set up a blue-ribbon committee to study the issue and make national policy recommendations.

"The excessive litigation in our society is not helping our competitive position worldwide," said Kocher. "It would be better to have companies increase the pace of innovation rather than use squads of lawyers to defend market share.

"There is a lot of concern-there's a longing for clarification, of what's legally possible and what's a fair use of ideas," Kocher said.

Lotus, which barred the door to march organizer Stallman when he sought to return his Lotus 1-2-3 manual during the demonstration, issued a statement defending its copyright violation suits.

It asserted: "Lotus believes that there's no innovation in copying. In fact it's worth noting that the two companies we have sued copied virtually all of the external elements of our product, including menu commands, screen presentations and sequences.

"The application of copyrights principally allows others to develop new ideas or new forms of expressing previously employed ideas," it said.

"Copyright law has amply protected creativity without stifling innovation in other fields of intellectual endeavor such as books and motion pictures, and we believe it can and will do the same for computer programming," the statement continued.