From league@ai.mit.edu Tue Feb 26 22:39:52 1991
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Date: Tue, 26 Feb 91 21:43:15 -0500
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Subject: LPF February Mailing, part 1
\input texinfo.tex
@settitle Mailing to Members
@headings doubleafter
@center @titlefont{February Mailing to League Members}
@heading Membership Expiration
League membership expires a year after you joined.
Since the League didn't get very organized until the beginning of 1990,
we've decided to extend the memberships of people who joined in 1989
through the end of 1990.
So, @strong{if you joined in 1989, or in early 1990, please renew now!}
If you don't renew, we'll send you a reminder. But that takes
work---and most of it is done by League members who volunteer their
time. Please save us time by renewing without a reminder.
@heading What is Your Email Address?
To save work, we are sending this mailing by email alone to the people
whose email addresses we know.
If you receive this mailing on paper, and you have an email address with
which you can receive mail from the Internet, please send mail to
@code{league@@prep.ai.mit.edu} to tell us what it is.
If you have an address on bitnet, then send the message via a suitable
gateway, such as @code{mitvma}. An address on CompuServe or MCI Mail
will also fill the bill; ask a wizard on those systems how to send mail
to an address on the Internet. When @code{league@@prep.ai.mit.edu}
receives mail from you, the message header will automatically tell us
your email address.
@heading Election
We almost didn't get a quorum for the election, and it was necessary to
put a lot of effort into phoning members in the final days to ask them
to fax in their ballots. But we did ultimately succeed in having 313
proxies plus a few actual humans---just a little over two-thirds of our
membership figure at the time.
Thus, Jack Larsen is now the president of the League. Richard Stallman
will continue doing a lot of the day-to-day organizing work, but Jack
Larsen will make the important decisions (except those made by the
Board) and will represent the League to businesses, executives and
attorneys.
Chris Hofstader, Steve Sisak, and Guy Steele were elected to the Board
of Directors; Jack Larsen is also a board member ex officio, and so is
Richard Stallman, the previous president.
The voting for president was 304 for Jack Larsen, 1 write-in vote for
Richard Stallman, and 1 write-in for Mitch Kapor. (Many feel it would
be great to have Kapor as the president, but he isn't a League member.
He says that he is unwilling to oppose Lotus so directly.)
The voting for secretary and treasurer was unanimous, though some voters
abstained.
The voting for directors was 266 for Guy Steele, 173 for Chris Hofstader,
146 for Steve Sisak, and 134 for Denis Filipetti.
The change in the bylaws was approved, 301 in favor, 4 against. This is
a good thing, since it will probably save us from a quorum crunch next
year.
@heading Apology
I, Richard Stallman, would like to apologize personally for failing to
include biographies of the four candidates for the board of directors in
the election mailing.
I do have an excuse, though. This election was going to be uncontested
until the fourth candidate was added at the last minute. When that
happened, I was in such frantic haste to get the mail out that I failed
to think of the consequences of the change.
This won't happen again.
@heading Biographies of League Officers and Directors
Jack Larsen (president, and director ex officio) was the first employee
of the telemetry project at Princeton University in 1943 as an offshoot
of a student project in nuclear physics. Digital and analogue data
processing was a large part of his fifteen-year engineering career in
avionics. Interests in the public policy of science led to two law
degrees, and a career in patent law. While representing MIT he began
teaching patent and trade- mark law at Suffolk University Law school,
and continued for fifteen years, became Professor and Director of the
Center for the Law of New Technology at the new Lewis University College
of Law, then returned to a practice which includes litigation, copyright
and licensing of software products and other intellectual property. His
firm is Otto and Blumenthal of Park Ridge, IL, near O'Hare Field.
Christian D. Hofstader (clerk and director) was one of the founding
members of the LPF and has served as the League's clerk since the
beginning. He has performed the following tasks for the League: getting
stickers printed, opening mail, answering the voice mail, attending
trade shows, organizing the SD 90 effort as well as many others. This
year Chris will continue with many of those tasks as well as take on
speaking engagements.
Chris is a former professional political activist and now
works as a software engineer specializing in assembly
language programming.
Stephen G. Sisak (treasurer and director) became the League's treasurer
when Denis Filipetti resigned the position in August 1990. Before
becoming treasurer Steve was one of the League's most active volunteers.
He was instrumental is getting the supplies and labor necessary for us
to be successful at AAAI as well as performing numerous smaller tasks.
Professionally Steve works as a software engineer
specializing in Macintosh programming.
Guy L. Steele Jr.@: (director) is a Senior Scientist at Thinking
Machines Corporation. He received his A.B.@: in applied mathematics
>from Harvard College (1975), and his S.M.@: and Ph.D.@: in computer
science and artificial intelligence from MIT (1977 and 1980). He has
been an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie-Mellon
University and a member of technical staff at Tartan Laboratories.
He is author or co-author of three books: @cite{Common Lisp: The
Language}; @cite{C: A Reference Manual}; and @cite{The Hacker's
Dictionary}. He has served on the ANSI standards committee X3J11 (C
language), and is currently vice-chairman of X3J13 (Common Lisp). The
ACM awarded him the 1988 Grace Murray Hopper Award.
Richard M. Stallman (director ex officio) was the first president of the
League. Before that, he organized the first protest rally at Lotus, and
the initial production of the Fanged Apple buttons. Professionally, he
is best known for his work with the Free Software Foundation on the free
operating system GNU. He received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in
1990, and was recently awarded the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award.
@heading Ashton-Tate Loses Lawsuit
The lawsuit by Ashton-Tate against Fox Software was dismissed in
December. The judge also ruled that Ashton-Tate had invalidated its
copyright on dBase because the doctrine of ``misuse of copyright''. It
is settled law that a patent obtained by fraud or by misleading the
Patent Office is invalid. Since the copyright law springs from the same
constitutional basis, a bargain between the claimant and the public, it
has been apparent that the same equitable principal would apply. Many
claims of copyright have been registered wherein the public was
short-changed in the bargain. Unlike the Patent Office, wherein the
claims are administratively scrutinized, copyrights have been available
on a sort of honor system, which over the centuries has worked well for
books, and other writings. The author's claimed monopoly was laid bare
by publication for any to see; but who can read a computer program,
particularly when a partial, or even an encrypted copy is all that the
public may see in return for the monopoly?
The Court found that dBase was derived from a public-domain program
developed at JPL, and that this fact was concealed from the Copyright
Office, contrary to the law and its rules.
This decision (which Ashton-Tate says it will appeal) did not decide the
fundamental issue of whether a language can be copyrighted. However,
in a backwards fashion, it seems to open that possibility. The author
of dBase states that he did not copy any code from the JPL database
program, just the programming language. So, if neglecting to state that
the language used was derived from an earlier work constituted deception
of the Copyright office, it can only be because the language is deemed a
substantial part of the work, and, therefore, potentially a
copyrightable work standing alone.
So, we can't really count this as a victory, even if it stands on
appeal.
However, if misuse of copyright may be a violation of the anti-trust
laws, then defendants can counterclaim with their own weapons including
injunctions and treble damages.
@heading Recent League Activities
The League had a booth at the SD90 conference in Boston in November. We
distributed large amounts of literature which stimulated inquiries from
quite a few software journalists and executives.
An unofficial presence at Comdex a week later had a similar result.
So far, however, this has not translated into a tremendous jump in
membership. We need more members, and this means we need the members to
put some effort into recruiting more members. A paper describing easy
and efficient techniques for doing this is included in this mailing.
@heading League Finances
As of January 1, the League had spent a total of $8222 and had a total
of $10732 on hand. Here is a breakdown of expenses:
@display
Printing, $2200
Buttons, $1900
Legal, $1250
Trade shows, $1120
Postage, $602
Lotus protest, $365
Bank fees, $162
Mailbox and phone, $175
Misc (other items, invidually under $100), $466
@end display
We expect to spend $4000 soon on printing and the SD 91 trade show.
@heading We Get an Interesting Endorsement
ParcPlace Systems has issued a statement endorsing the League and its
position. This company, a spin-off of Xerox PARC, develops Smalltalk
systems. The latest issue of their newsletter for customers had a brief
article on the back page, speaking about the League, endorsing our
position, and urging their customers to contact us.
@heading Publishing to Prevent Patents
One way to prevent a technique from being patented is to publish a
description of it. The League would like to start publishing for this
purpose.
All that is needed to bar a patent is that the invention shall have been
(1) described in a (2) printed publication (3) more than one year prior
to the patent application, or prior to the applicant's conception date,
and that the publication gets into the Patent and Trademark Office
Examiner's files. The publication need not be fancy, but it must be
public. Even one copy in the MIT Engineering Library will do, as long as it
is cataloged to show date of acquisition.
Ideally, whoever publishes for this purpose will
consult the Patent Office Classification System to determine what class
or classes the publication pertains to, so that copies can be sent
directly to the appropriate examiner. The examiners scan
their informal files constantly, and they create informal sub-classes,
so that eventually the publication will get to the right place.
To do this, first of all, we need material to publish. We need articles
describing techniques that might not appear in other literature. These
articles do not have to be well written! We won't be publishing to
interest a real audience, as real journals do. For an engineer or
programmer with a patent problem, even a badly written article can be
welcome indeed. But it does have to be clear enough that it unmistakeably
describes the invention well enough that a person ``having ordinary
skill in the art to which it pertains'' might practice the technique
or method, or make and use a machine.
Before you write an article, it would be a good idea to check a few text
books to make sure someone hasn't already done the job. For example,
check @cite{The Art of Computer Programming} by Donald Knuth.
Send your articles to the League mailing address, or email them to the
League at @code{league@@prep.ai.mit.edu}. We'll take care of publishing
them.
@heading Institutional Members
One thing the League needs very much is additional institutional
members. So far, we have just two: TGV, Inc., which makes networking
software for VMS, and Snitily Graphics Consulting Services, a consulting
company. Other companies whose executives support the League hesitate
to join because there have not been enough others to make us seem
respectable.
This means we need to try hard to bootstrap ourselves with a few more
institutional members. If you are an executive, please consider having
your company join the League. If you are an employee, please raise the
possibility for your employer.
Here are the terms for institutional members.
@quotation
The dues are $100 for an institution with up to three employees, $250
for an institution with four to nine employees, and $500 for an
institution with ten or more employees.
For $5000, an institution can be a sponsor rather than a member.
Institutional members and sponsors do not have votes in the League.
@end quotation
Note that these dues have been reduced, in the hope of encouraging more
institutions to join. We might establish lower dues for non-profit
organizations, if such organizations want to join.
We strongly urge institutional members to mention their member status in
all their publicity, as long as this is not done so as to imply League
endorsement of the company's activities or products. This can help
promote the member as well as the League, just as sponsoring a concert
or another public interest organization would.
We also urge members to distribute the League's materials to their
customers---the more, the better.
@heading Regional Working Groups
In order to carry out more activities, the League needs local working
groups in the areas where there are concentrations of programmers or
students of computer science.
The first thing needed for a local group is a person who wants to
organize it. These groups don't need an official existence, so it is
not a lot of work to organize one. The main thing the organizer needs
to do is to keep track of the members and sympathizers in his or her
area (with help from headquarters), find out about events where
something useful might be done, and inform the members about what work
is needed.
Easy things a local group can do include handing out League literature
at trade shows and conferences, and picketing events sponsored by the
look and feel plaintiffs. Picketing requires only a few people, so it
is not a big job like a protest rally. We can ship you some picket
signs we made for the last rally, if you need them. We also plan to
make a large print run of our position papers, so that you won't have to
scrounge for printing.
Another thing a group can do is promote speakers and find them
opportunities to speak. It isn't hard to find opportunities if you
don't limit your consideration to large and prestigious audiences. The
League already gets more requests for speakers than it can easily fill.
So far we have people organizing local groups in Houston, New York City,
Boulder, Columbus and the San Francisco area. The League's base serves
as a local group in Boston. It would be useful to have working groups
in the other centers of high-tech activity such as Berkeley, Los
Angeles, San Diego, Washington DC, Austin, Raleigh-Durham, Pittsburgh,
Eugene and Minneapolis, as well as Chicago, where Jack Larsen has his
office.
If you would like to organize a group, let us know, and we can put you
in touch with the other members in your area.
@bye