Re: [Patents] newsscan: Software patent limits 'go too far'

[Seth Johnson <seth.johnson@RealMeasures.dyndns.org>]

> > Our activism should have come 15 years earlier, indeed.  You have a
> > point here, but ...
> 
> How could have it been possible? Software patents were not such an
> important issue for all of us at that time! Now it is and now is the
> time to do something.
> 
> > > and not put the blame on lawmakers whose job is not to guess
> > > what's right and wrong put to translate interests in words
> > > compatible with the existing legal system.


Lawmakers who fail to serve the public must always be called to account.

I was programming in high school, between 1979 and 1983, on a Radio Shack
Color Computer.  My family owned a Radio Shack franchise.

I have always been opposed to software patents, and have followed Richard
Stallman's career avidly through the years.

I have also been deeply involved in organizing, mostly in the labor arena.

Translating organizing methods to the information freedom arena is tricky,
and even now the closest thing we have to a disciplined cadre are the Free
Software Foundation (though they are mostly still basically developers with
principles, not a group that has well-understood roles in a fighting machine
-- that is changing, though!), an increasing number of local G/LUGs, the
FFII and Eurolinux and their associates (who are a bit focused on legal
lobbying), and only two groups in the New York area that I have found in
several years of surveying the scene that are remotely based on
community-based organizing principles.

Aside from this, we have the whole cohort of public advocacy and public
interest groups who have kept the cause alive, most famously the EFF.  This
includes the PIRGs and "consumer" advocate groups.  Except for some of the
PIRGs, these groups' work is focused on trying to get seats at the
"negotiating" table.  They await the flash that would spark public outrage,
and put out news releases and calls for actions.

The main problem with information freedom organizing is that it's inherently
abstract and difficult to connect up with visceral contradictions that
people can confront directly -- as well as the fact that it's caught up in
false notions of the status of exclusive rights as compared to fundamental
rights which have been promulgated by exactly the kind of interpretation of
how to craft exclusive rights policy that you keep going on about: bring
together the so-called "stakeholders," let them hash out their differences
and write the law and have the legislators sign off on it.

In the last few years some specific things have occurred which have finally
signaled a reversing of the premises of the general discussion related to
information freedom.

The main thing I have been doing has been seeking out the principled voices
throughout the arena and all the related fights, and making sure that they
see their connections and that they receive public endorsement and support.

Seth Johnson

-- 

DRM is Theft!  We are the Stakeholders!

New Yorkers for Fair Use
http://www.nyfairuse.org

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