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: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (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: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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.
