To the ill-informed it might have looked like a scene from some long-lost sequel to Revenge of the Nerds. Two hundred or so computer-programming devotees, a.k.a. "hackers," were gathered in Technology Square, a tree-speckled concrete plaza in the high-tech post-industrial park adjoining the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.
The purpose of the gathering was to march on the nearby headquarters of the computer software leviathan, Lotus Development Corporation. The march was to protest Lotus' rash of lawsuits aimed at extending copyright protection to something called "the look and feel" of its famous spreadsheet programs.
In popular mythology, hackers are presumed to lead nocturnal, mushroomlike existences in windowless cubicles littered with carryout pizza boxes and illuminated only by the ghastly green glow of the monitor screen. But this August midday was blindingly bright and hot (for New England).
The hackers braved the elements because they believe the Lotus lawsuits are emblematic of a whole series of legal and political battles in which the stakes include the definitions of free speech and democracy in the information age. The questions raised by the Lotus suits revolve around the distinctions between speech and property rights, distinctions which become blurred in the high-tech world, where ideas are both the medium and content of billion-dollar commerce.
The specifics of Lotus' beef have to do with the "user interface" of their 1-2-3 software. The user interface is the set of on-screen graphics, text, and command instructions that allow dummies like myself to make practical use of technologies we really don't understand. User interface includes things like which key you actually hit to save data or to move it from place to place within a document.
User interface is distinct from the actual programming code (the set of instructions activated by your keystrokes). Programming code has, from the inception of the computer industry, been treated as copyrightable protected material, like the contents of this magazine or any other creative work. User interface commands, however, were widely considered to be public domain simply as a matter of common sense. Life in an already maddening world is much less maddening when most programs have you use, say, the "Enter" key or the direction pointers in more or less similar ways.
In a lawsuit against Paperback, a much smaller software company, Lotus claimed copyright protection over these basic user instructions. In Federal District Court, Lotus won the first round. Lotus claimed that forcing programmers to reinvent the wheel every time they begin a project will lead to more innovation because programmers will know that their ideas (and their employers' profits) are protected from copycats.
In the real world, however, the decision will have the effect of enforcing software monopolies. Lotus, for instance, already controls 60 percent of the world spreadsheet market. It will be virtually impossible for anyone with a product not compatible with Lotus to compete in that market. If a company buys a non-Lotus program, it will have to retrain its work force completely, and perhaps purchase new machinery to boot.
PROPONENTS OF PROGRAMMING freedom insist that the basic vocabulary of user interface commands is directly analogous to the configuration of gears on a car (P-R-N-D-L), or the arrangement of letter keys on a typewriter, or of notes on a piano. Common sense should tell you that, whoever used them first, these things are no one's exclusive property. They are instead part of the body of common knowledge necessary for human interaction.
If the high-tech corporations continue these border raids on the public domain, they will eventually strike the heart of a key constitutional ambiguity in American life. We have historically held sacred the right to private ownership and profit. But we have, at our best, held equally sacred the right to free expression and free intellectual inquiry.
In the civics-class conception of the United States, these rights are held to be complementary. That's the American hustle, and at the moment the whole world is clamoring to buy into it. But it could turn out to be a shell game. If ideas and speech can be subsumed into property rights -- intellectual property, it's called -- then free enterprise can, and eventually will, strangle free expression.
Richard Stallman holds out for a different approach to questions of fair use and free markets. Stallman's hacker vision is indigenously democratic and egalitarian. Stallman, 37 years old, is the founder and president of the League for Programming Freedom, which sponsors the anti-Lotus protests. He is also the founder of the Free Software Foundation and recent recipient of a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant."
Among other things, Stallman and his colleagues in Free Software are engaged in developing computer programs that can perform the same functions as commercial software. Free Software then makes these programs available to anyone who will agree not to sell them for profit. That's what Stallman calls "copyleft."
Stallman -- gaunt, bearded, and with black hair hanging down to mid-back -- was the final speaker at the August rally outside the Lotus offices. In his remarks he compared the software wars to another political struggle waged in the Charles River basin almost 220 years ago. He suggested that hackers could be seen as a contemporary version of the colonial-era Minutemen, standing vigilant against an encroaching tyranny. He even suggested that the relatively small protest offered on that day might be viewed in the 21st century as the shot heard 'round the world.
Danny Duncan Collum is a contributing editor of Sojourners.
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