Editor: Spike R. MacPhee (spiker@prep.ai.mit.edu)
Reproduction of Programming Freedom via all electronic media is encouraged. To reproduce a signed article individually, please contact the author for permission.
The fight ended when a draft report on EDVAC that von Neumann had written in 1945 was held to be a prior publication. Thus, all of the inventions in question became part of the public domain.
One result of this dispute was that von Neumann changed the patent policy for his computer project at the Institute for Advanced Studies. The original plan was to have patents assigned to individual engineers. Instead, all ideas were placed in the public domain.
Von Neumann said "This meant, of course, that the situation had taken a turn which is very favorable for us, since we are hardly interested in exclusive patents, but rather in seeing that anything that we contributed to the subject ... remains as accessible as possible to the general public."
| Nov 91: | Unix User reprinted "Against Software Patents" |
| Jan - Feb: | J. Eric Townsend of U. of Houston, Texas, jet@uh.edu, asked for LPF tshirts to sell locally and sold over a dozen, counting the three people who emailed and then wrote us as a result of his posts to Texas bulletin boards. He has a stock of handouts, stickers and a few buttons that he can give out in the local area. |
| Feb 23-8: | SD 92 conf in Santa Clara - we again took a booth (see article by rms). |
| Mar 16: | National Law Journal - article on rms & Feb 29 Computer Law Symposium at UCal Hastings College of Law. |
| Mar 28-9: | Boston Computer Society Macintosh Megameeting - LPF table |
| Spring 92: | (Vol 12 #1) EurOpen: Forum for Open Systems News Letter ran "Against Software Patents" |
The enormous sum has no precedent in copyright law and few equals in any type of civil litigation in the United States. It is nearly twice Microsoft's $2.4 billion in revenues for all of 1991 and some 70 percent of Apple's $6.3 billion revenues for the same year. The figure represents almost half the value of company Chairman William H. Gates' $7.35 billion stake in Microsoft.
The figure is contained in a document filed by Apple in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on Feb. 1 but sealed until Tuesday, when the company agreed to allow Microsoft to make part of it public. It is the latest in a tortuous series of legal maneuvers since Apple sued Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard Co. in 1988, alleging that Microsoft had copied the "look and feel" of the Macintosh computer's user interface in its Windows program. H-P is involved because the New Wave user interface is based largely on Windows.
The trial is expected to start this summer.
According to a statement by Microsoft, the amount comprises slightly more than $3 billion Apple claims it suffered in reduced unit sales and depressed selling prices, and $1.4 billion in gross revenues it claims Microsoft realized selling Windows and related applications programs.
The two companies disagree, however, on what the total figure means. Apple spokeswoman Barbara Krause said the sum is not Apple's actual damages claim but only the estimate of one expert witness, Robert E. Hall of the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. "We have not said what the damages will be," she said.
But Microsoft contends it is Apple's "statement of damages," said William H. Neukom, Microsoft's vice president of law and corporate affairs, who described the figure as "unsupportable and speculative."
Attorneys and analysts say the sum is very likely legal posturing, and both sides agree the figure Apple actually presents to the jury at the start of the trial could be different. Even if it is not, observers agree that the $4.4 billion is unlikely to be close to what Apple might be awarded should it win the case.
"There will be no settlement at or near those figures," said Dan Kaufman, an intellectual-property attorney with Brobeck, Phleger & Harrison in Palo Alto. "If they ask for a number like that, they will have to fight to the death."
The largest judgement in a similar case, involving a patent dispute over instant photography between Polaroid and Eastman Kodak, amounted to only $873 million -- nearly half of that interest accrued during the 14 years the case dragged through the courts. Only a few class-action lawsuits involving thousands of victims have ended up with multibillion-dollar judgements, Kaufman said.
Throwing such a figure on the table "makes it difficult to see them settling this for cash," said Doug Kass, a Dataquest Inc. analyst.
Both Apple and Microsoft say they have no current intention of settling the case.
[The Mercury News lets non-profit corporations reprint their articles, and even allows electronic distribution.]
Addendum: In March, Microsoft said that Apple had increased the damage claim in the lawsuit from $4.37 billion to $5.55 billion.
Microsoft has filed motions seeking to dismiss Apple's claims in their user-interface copyright infringement case. At issue is principally whether Microsoft's Windows copies a certain 10 "screen elements" from Apple's Macintosh GUI, and if so, whether the copying constitutes copyright infringement. The 10 elements are all that remain out of a much greater number of "similarities in particular features" that Apple earlier asserted were wrongfully copied by Microsoft.
Taken together, Microsoft's motions ask for dismissal with respect to the 10 screen elements on three alternative and largely overlapping grounds. The grounds, in effect, are:
>From the League's point of view, only dismissal on ground [2] would be a clear victory with the best chance of correctly directing the copyright/user interface debate. Unfortunately, Microsoft is unlikely to win dismissal on any of the 3 grounds, in which event the case will likely be decided by a jury.
Charles B. Kramer -Attorney-
>From Internet 72600.2026@Compuserve.com
...just to let you know. I receive one request for information about the LPF every two or three weeks on average. Not so bad.
Francois Pinard ``Vivement GNU!'' pinard@iro.umontreal.ca
Consider joining the League for Programming Freedom. Email for details
And one person's request for LPF info as a result:
Well, after seeing all these .signatures with your guys' name on it, I decided to find out what it was all about.Last issue, I said that we were getting 2 or more .sig-generated queries per week; now it's up to 4 or more per week. We've increased our size by one-third since the start of the year, from 450 to over 600.
Number of members who have joined or renewed within the last year: 617.
- srm -
At some of these talks he ran into some opposition from a new group called the "Abraham Lincoln Patent Holders' Association", which was founded by Paul Heckel. (That is the person who threatened to sue the users of Hypercard in order to pressure Apple into paying him money.)
One of Heckel's associates, a lawyer named Higgins, spoke at Hastings. The audience there seemed to believe Stallman more, but one attendee said, "That's because they are lawyers and they are trained to find the flaws in a fallacious argument. If it were a less sophisticated audience, many of them would believe Higgins because he is a lawyer."
At one talk, Heckel himself showed up, and proceeded to live up to his name. Stallman mentioned the fact that Heckel has admitted not realizing that Hypercard might be considered to infringe Heckel's patent, until being informed of this by his lawyer. Heckel said, "I was simply misinformed as to the scope of my protection." Of course, this only substantiated the point that Stallman was trying to make, and pointing this out caused Heckel to sit down and keep quiet for the rest of the talk.
Heckel came to Stallman's next talk also, but left three-quarters of the way through without saying anything. What does this mean? The optimistic interpretation is that he was stymied. The pessimistic one is that he came to gather ammunition.
The remaining talk of the six was at the Critical Software Meeting - an annual meeting of people involved in software development for the DOD. This talk seems to have had mixed success: several of the attendees said they were stunned by what they heard; but they did not vote to choose intellectual property as a topic for further work during the meeting.
I don't know of any meetings coming up; the LPF tends to be light on face-to-face meetings. We do have an annual meeting in Boston near the end of each calendar year, and all members are notified weeks in advance. Adam Richter sometimes organizes meetings for members in the Berkeley area.
Many of us do much of our interaction over the electronic nets, and projects (such as writing articles, having t-shirts printed, educating the public, etc.) tend to be initiated by one member, though others often help out. If you'd like to volunteer to do something, that's terrific, as we can always use more. If you can suggest a project you'd be willing to do, all the better.
Members might want to organize meetings of the members in their area. People interested in doing this should contact both Spike MacPhee, spiker@prep.ai.mit.edu, and Adam Richter, adam@soda.berkeley.edu, to get help and advice.
- mernst@theory.lcs.mit.edu (Michael Ernst)
Michael maintains the LPF off-line print library of LPF, patent, and copyright articles, and the on-line index to them. See "League Papers Online" in the Boutique section at the end of the issue.
In February, the LPF had a booth at the SD92 trade show in Santa Clara, CA, just as we did a year ago. This show is attended primarily by software developers from the PC world.
The primary purpose of the booth was to inform more programmers of the problems they face, and to recruit their support. A secondary goal was to raise money with buttons, t-shirts and mugs.
The booth was staffed by Peter Deutsch, Peter Hendrickson, Hans Reiser, Adam Richter, and Richard Stallman.
We had considerable success toward the main goal. We distributed around 700 buttons and probably 1500 position paper booklets. We signed up 14 new members at the booth.
We didn't achieve the secondary goal; we spent around $2500 (including the cost of the supplies) and made back only around $1500. (It's possible that additional people who met us there will join and reduce the gap, but it will be hard to tell.) At this point, it is not clear whether we should consider this a cost-effective activity.
[The Wall Street Journal asked for $77 royalties for us to run 800 copies of this two-page article in paper form only: they said it is illegal to reproduce this article in electronic form for network, email or database distribution, and would not give permission for anyone to do so for any of their articles. The LPF Board chose not to distribute this issue in paper form only. Check out this interesting article about the trial judge at your local library.]
These lists are filtered by a moderator to:
League-tactics@prep.ai.mit.edu is for discussion of LPF directions and is not moderated.
Michael I. Bushnell is stepping down after a year of being the ecom (electronic communicator) for league@prep.ai.mit.edu, the LPF's information eddress. We would like to thank him for the 2-3 hours each week that he spent as a volunteer on our behalf answering queries.
Reading your [Jan] online edition of PROGRAMMING FREEDOM I am reminded
of why I haven't renewed my League membership. I believe in the
League and its objectives, but I will not support the use of direct
mail campaigns. The easiest way to *not* support direct mail is to
not renew my membership.
99.9% of the direct mail I receive goes into the garbage can unopened.
I resent it, and I suspect others may feel the same way. Did the
League really reach 4000 people? I count 14 people, not 4000. Direct
mail is also wasteful environmentally.
I am not offering a solution to the problem of delivering the league's
message where it is needed. I wish I could. But I am voicing an
opinion about direct mailing. It has a worse effect on our society
than software patents. The ends do not justify the means.
Clinton Jeffery
cjeffery@cs.arizona.edu
Last year league-tactics got a half-dozen messages from members who objected to direct mail for one reason or another. This was Aubrey Jaffer's reply to them:
Direct Mail is the least intrusive form of advertising. It takes less than a second to throw away a piece of mail. Unlike a billboard or poster or television advertisement you don't have to look at it day after day. For example, It took longer for me receive the first screen of your unsolicited message (at 1200 baud) than it does for you to throw away mail.If a large number of League members object to direct mailing then that could be a reason to stop; but just a half-dozen doesn't seem like enough reason to stop, given that the officers don't share the sentiment. At present, the Board is planning to debate the feasibility of a 2nd experiment in direct mailing. Make your pro or con views known to us at league-tactics@prep.ai.mit.edu.As for waste of paper and gas, We are sending out 4000 pieces compared to the billion of pieces a day the post office handles. Our mailing is made from recyclable materials (no windows in the envelopes).