Fwd: A steering committee for the LPF?

[J.H.M. Dassen]

This may well be of interest to SPI, or indivual readers of this list -
please keep discussion of it on gnu.misc.discuss.

Ray

From: ps at cam._nospam_.org (Pierre Sarrazin)
Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss
Subject: A steering committee for the LPF?
Date: 20 Mar 1999 00:20:57 -0500
Organization: League for Programming Freedom
Lines: 34
Sender: ps at CAM.ORG
Message-ID: <7cvb7p$at1 at ocean.CAM.ORG>

Since October 1998, I have been maintaining the website of the League
for Programming Freedom at <http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/>. On this site,
there is an email address where people can write to offer their help.

A number of people have offered to help, but unfortunately there is no
defined agenda for the LPF. The League has no formal organization
right now and I am limiting myself to the role of a webmaster.

I am posting this article here in hopes of starting a discussion among
people who would be interested in forming a steering committee for the
LPF. These people would have to decide what they specifically want to
do to obtain the abolition of software patents by the
U.S. Congress. The LPF also opposes user interface copyrights, but
since a major 1996 U.S. Supreme Court decision, this problem seems to
have receded for now (see the website for details).

The job of the committee would be to define a strategy to eventually
convince Congress of outlawing software patents. Recent news about
Microsoft's patent on style sheets and Sightsound's threats against
MP3.com (regarding patents over downloading audio over a network) may
provide arguments to convince lawmakers that software patents should
be abolished as soon as possible before they become an intolerable
impediment to the software community. A letter-writing campaign might
be a good start; I could post the results on the website.

Greg Aharonian's Internet Patent News Service has published some
issues about the two patents I mentioned:
<http://lpf.ai.mit.edu/Patents/patents.html#IPNS>

The front page of the LPF website shows an index to the article
"Against Software Patents", which is a very good read for anyone who
wishes to have a reminder of why software patents are a threat.