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Report on Hamilton, Canada LUG Special Session on SCO v. IBM
Thursday, February 02 2006 @ 11:20 AM EST

Groklaw's John Macdonald attended the Hamilton Linux User Group's special session on the SCO v. IBM litigation last night, which featured Peter Salus, Robert Young and Ren Bucholz as speakers. John was kind enough to send us a report, and the best news is that there will be a video and audio feed eventually. Peter told me a little about the event too. He says about 30% of the audience said they'd heard about the event from Groklaw. John says at least a quarter from where he was sitting, so a number of you went. If anyone has more details, feel free to let us know in your comments.

**********************

Report from Hamilton
~by John Macdonald

The Hamilton Linux User Group tonight had a special session nominally on the SCOG vs. IBM court case but actually covering a wide range of topics sometimes only vaguely related -- but all of the topics would be familiar to any regular reader of Groklaw. The panel featured Peter Salus (Unix and Linux historian), Robert Young (co-founder of Red Hat), and Ren Bucholz (EFF Policy Co-ordinater).

For the first hour, the panelists discussed a variety of issues. Then, after a refreshment break, questions from the audience were accepted and responded to. I'll describe what I recall of various topics, although this will sometimes be joining different portions of the two sessions that touched on the same topic at different times and in different ways.

A timeline of the SCOG vs. the Linux world court cases was handed out before the start, and since everyone present was assumed to be able to read, it was only briefly referred to. Peter summarized the general status, and amongst other things mentioned that some very large software company from the Northwest United States shared a director with an investment company that provided funding to SCOG just before they filed their initial lawsuit. IBM was admired for doing the right thing in fighting the case, rather than doing an easy or inexpensive choice such as settling or buying SCO out. (Of course, fighting is expensive and settling is cheap only for a single case, i.e., as long as no one else says, "Aha, now I'll just sue IBM to get my easy settlement too.")

The discussion quickly moved from the court cases to other topics. There were descriptions of the various sorts of intellectual property legal frameworks that exist, and how they have evolved from benefitting society to instead benefit the creators, often to the detriment of society.

Discussion of the political arena touched on many issues.

One significant event from the recent Canadian national election was highlighted -- in Toronto, Sam Bulte has been the Liberal party member of parliament. She has received large amounts of funding from music/video organizations, and has been working for an extremely pro-industry set of copyright amendments. A fundraising dinner was organized for her near the end of the election campaign by the industry groups. This was blogged extensively, in particular by Michael Geist (http://michaelgeist.ca). What was notable, though, was that the online blogging was picked up by the national media, and was used by citizens at candidates' meetings. When Ms. Bulte lost, the voting was close enough that it is reasonable to think that this copyright issue was enough to cause her defeat. Since that defeat was a portion of the change in government to having a different party in power, the bill she influenced will likely be changed. (It had not been passed before the end of the previous government). A couple of interesting comments about that bill (called bill C60) were made. Peter noted that while the bill seems bad to us, it is actually a much more lenient bill than most other countries have passed. He also said that many of the portions that Ms. Bulte had submitted were modified significantly -- the bill could have been much worse.

Bob pointed out that, while the lobbying power of monied interests may seem insurmountable "votes trump money". He also told of being surprised by the relatively slow progress that the RIAA/MPAA lobby had in affecting U.S. legislature. He referred to this to someone from Intel when a particular piece of legislature was coming up and was told not to worry. If you add up the entire entertainment industry, you get an amount about the same size as Intel which is only one company in the consumer electronics industry. So, when a law would reduce content copying but would reduce the demand for electronics, there are conflicting lobby groups involved. While Junior downloading a movie is bad for the content indistry, it is a reason to buy another computer (or at least another disk drive) and is good for the hardware industry.

Ren warned of the end run that is done to bypass electoral control over IP. Interests get IP embedded into U.N. resolutions that all countries are told is now an international standard and that they must effect the U.N. policy with their own national laws. The EFF is making sure that the consumer point of view gets some attention in these procedures. (The Canadian bill C60 mentioned above is one example of a country moving to cover the requirements of the U.N. committee process.)

One of the audience members was the person responsible for Linux within IBM Canada. He described aspects of the patent portfolio that IBM builds each year, and how it is being opened up for Open Source use.

An audience member suggested that the overreaching forms of IP law can be viewed as an tax or a drain on productivity and wondered how it can be sustained. The example of China was given by the panel to support this thesis. China largely ignores IP issues and it has the fastest growing economy in the world. Other examples listed studies that showed an obvious correlation between significant bureaucracy and poor economic results.

When the organizer was thanking people for various items of publicity, Peter asked how many people in the audience had first heard of the talk through the Groklaw article. In the direction I was looking, about a quarter of the people raised their hands.

The event was very well run. For people who could not attend (whether they were time- or geography-challenged) there is good news. There was both an audio and a video recording made of the event. These will be published in the future.


  


Report on Hamilton, Canada LUG Special Session on SCO v. IBM | 156 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Off Topic here
Authored by: IMANAL on Thursday, February 02 2006 @ 11:49 AM EST
Off topic here

---
--------------------------
IM Absolutely Not A Lawyer

[ Reply to This | # ]

Corrections here
Authored by: Liquor A. on Thursday, February 02 2006 @ 11:51 AM EST
including s/Ms. Bulpe had submitted/Ms. Bulte had submitted/

---
Liquor A.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Recycled post
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 02 2006 @ 12:22 PM EST
I posted the below comments in the previous story.

"I just got back from the Hamilton Linux Users Group event.
www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20060116100204182
It was excellent. There will be lots of people reporting on it and there were
two video cameras so I won't provide any detail. My impression was that about a
quarter of the room had heard about the event on Groklaw. The room was full.
I'd say there were more than seventy but fewer than a hundred in the audience.
The median age was way over thirty.

The comment came from the podium that, even for the most crass politician, votes
trump money. The group at the event were the kind that politicians listen to;
articulate and likely to vote. The potential for political action seems
impressive. Canada is in an interesting place politically. There is a minority
government and the next election is less than two years away (probably). Given
that bill C60 is currently dead, this would be a really good time to write a
bunch of letters and make sure it stays that way."

[ Reply to This | # ]

Meeting capacity and attendance
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 02 2006 @ 01:13 PM EST
Some of my casual observations from the HLUG panel on 01 February.

I counted 103 chairs in the central seating area. There was a lot of standing
room and some elected to use that even while seats were available. I estimate
attendance as 85. I guess the tape will tell.

An earlier poster made an age estimate for the crowd. The audience was largely
but not exclusively male. Perhaps 5% of attendees were female.

Early on, Dr. Salus asked if any lawyers were in attendance. One confessed, . .
. er, "self-identified." I wanted to ask, "From which
firm?" but, hey I wasn't on the stage.

rweait

[ Reply to This | # ]

Report on Hamilton, Canada LUG Special Session on SCO v. IBM
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 02 2006 @ 02:15 PM EST
I see here the use of the acronym SCOG which I appreciate since I was a happy
customer of the real SCO. It is only one more letter and extremely telling, why
doesn't Groklaw use SCOG instead of SCO when refering to the SCO Group?

[ Reply to This | # ]

Current Status of Bill C-60
Authored by: Rann on Thursday, February 02 2006 @ 03:25 PM EST
For the non-Canadians (and those Canadians needing a refresher on Canadian
Civics)

When Canada has an election and a government is formed it is referred to as a
Parliament. This newest government is the 39th Parliament. The 38th Parliament
was dissolved on November 29, 2005 when the election was called. Unlike the USA,
for instance, Parliaments are not a fixed length of time... though the maximum
possible length is fixed at 5 years. Each Parliament is broken up into various
sessions, nominally, the Fall , Winter and Spring sessions.

To try and pass a law here, a Bill must be proposed while Parliament is sitting,
either by the Senate (which is appointed) or the House of Commons (which were
just elected). A Bill introduced through the Senate is numbered with an
"S" in front while one introduced in the House of Commons is prefixed
with a "C". To be proclaimed into law, a Bill passr 3 Readings, (each
of which has a vote) and consideration (and vote) by the other house eg A Senate
Bill must be considered by the Commons and voted on by the House and visa
versa. If a Bill has not been passed into law by the end of the Parliament, the
Bill "dies on the floor". It then must be reintroduced again in the
next parliament.

Bill C60 was introduced through first Reading in the House of Commons. If I
remember correctly, it was in Second Reading (where a very carefully
consideration and revision is done). It was still under consideration when the
38th Parliament was dissolved.... and "died on the floor of the House of
Commons" (it had not been introduced for consideration in the Senate).

C60 is DEAD. It must be reintroduced during the next session of Parliament....
and start all over again. Considering that we have a change in government(it
was a Liberal minority government... now it's a Conservtive minority one), the
likelyhood of an early re-introduction is slim. If it is reintroduced, it will
likely be in a far different form than it was originally written in the last
Parliament.

Rann

[ Reply to This | # ]

Cleaning up C60
Authored by: darkonc on Thursday, February 02 2006 @ 03:34 PM EST
Peter noted that while the bill seems bad to us, it is actually a much more lenient bill than most other countries have passed.

That's no reason to fight for it to be cleaned up. People look to precedents, and having the precedent of a 'good' copyright law is good for everybody around the world.

There was a recent CBC article about top bureaucrats being paid way more than explicit government rules allowed. Each department justified the overpayments by pointing out how each other department did the same thing. That everybodyt else was breaking the rules became a justification for everybody breaking the rules. Who did it first was then lost in the shuffle.

If Canada stays on track to creating a decent copyright overhaul, then other jurisdictions can point to Canada as a bastion of reasonablness that should be joined.

---
Powerful, committed communication. Touching the jewel within each person and bringing it to life..

[ Reply to This | # ]

  • Hear! Hear! n/t - Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, February 02 2006 @ 04:46 PM EST
True for some types of music, but...
Authored by: ElvishArtisan on Friday, February 03 2006 @ 08:01 AM EST
not for others. Many types of 'pop' music can be produced inexpensively,
although not all (just try doing a big Glenn Miller production number 'on the
cheap'). However, many types of classical music will always require large
numbers of people and the large financial backing that such an organization
implies. You're not going to produce a decent recording of Beethoven's Ninth
with 'four guitars and a drum kit'.

Cheers!

[ Reply to This | # ]

Report on Hamilton, Canada LUG Special Session on SCO v. IBM
Authored by: pbakker on Friday, February 03 2006 @ 08:51 AM EST
Here is another report based on notes that I took at the session. I have left out some parts that are already covered by John Macdonald's report.

Bob Young finds that copyright has gone astray. Around WWII copyright was 20 years. Copyright has been extended several times each time Mickey Mouse was about to lose copyright protection. Peter Salus added that the Sonny Bono bill (1998) extended protection to 70 years from the death of the creator. Effectively copyright lasts a 100 years. The song "I got You Babe" will be protected for a long time.

Bob states that the flaw in IP legislation is that there is a fundamental difference between physical objects and IP. When someone builds a chair, that chair can be willed to his kids. Copyright also allows someone to will the copyright to a song he writes to his children. The difference is that copyrights prevents everyone else from writing a similar song while there is nothing preventing anyone else from building his own chair.

Looking at Lulu, implementing DRM protection means that they must partner with one of the big consortium because they hold all the patents.

In 1976 copyright law eliminated the requirement to publish a copyright statement. This was a bigger change than extending copyright to 100 years because now you have to assume that copyright is held by someone. Legislators need to change this back. If the publisher doesn't care that work is in the public domain then the user shouldn't have to care. Using Creative Commons attribution is one way in which publishers can put works into the public domain.

Ren Bucholz explained that EFF started about 15 years ago. For the first 10 years they concentrated on privacy and free speech issues. Now they are also proponents of free software. IP are landmines working against freedom.

Peter Salus moved the discussion forward by stating that patents are the second evil of IP. There is a connection between copyrights and patents. Copyright was started in Britain in 1709 or 1710 and the first patent law came about 10 years later. Patent and Copyright laws were intended to benefit the creator. The US constitution states that patents are to encourage further development because creators will only do so when they get fair recompense.

Initially physical substantiation for patents was required, which is no longer the case. The patent system is now functioning with the motivation to issue and uphold patents, not from denying. The average patent application costs $25,000 USD. In the US more than 100,000 patents are issued each year. The patent filing industry is huge and they have a vested interest in keeping a broken industry broken.

Bob explained that the business environment in the US is tougher than in Canada, with a "take no prisoners" approach. SCO is not on its own, just follow the money. Microsoft invested $25M in SCO through the Canadian bank RBC, money which if taken back into the US would have required tax payments.

Ren Bucholz has been active internationally with the EFF. In additional to IP pressure in individual countries there are international treaties written, e.g. in Geneva. Once new IP restrictions are written into the international treaties, these get taken back to various countries with the incentive to adopt these treaties unchanged. There may be money and influence available from parties who would like to extend IP rights, but the bright spot is that for politicians votes trump money. Therefore the raising of political awareness around IP issues so that these issues become election issues is effective in stopping the implementation of legislation that is influenced by money. In the fight against expansion of IP rights in international forums, allies can exist in countries that have a stake in the outcome of agriculture, e.g. Brazil, India, and South Africa.

Bob Young talked about the founding of Red Hat. In the 90's when observing the falling prices of hardware against the increasing prices of software, harm was being done. As an entepreneur Bob looked at where harm was being done, then positioned Red Hat to serve people that were being harmed by providing an alternative consisting of free software.

Ren followed up by saying that the consumer is being harmed in restrictions on DVD usage and lack of innovation in this area, e.g. restrictions on backup or inability to take lawful video clips. In this case entrepreneurial opportunities are precluded by laws. 3-2-1 Studios was sued for marketing a DVD copying product.

Bob answered a question from the audience regarding SCO's overvalued stock price. An investor may want to have both IBM and SCO stock so that no matter which way the court decisions go, the investor would have hedged his bets.

There was a question regarding SCO's future in the lawsuits, allowing SCO to back away from litigation and leaving questions regarding Linux copyrights unanswered. Peter answered that SCO could drop its lawsuits, but that does not make the counterclaims go away, even in a bankruptcy situation.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Report on Hamilton, Canada LUG Special Session on SCO v. IBM
Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, February 03 2006 @ 10:04 AM EST
Well, knowing a little about GL programming (graphics library, that is), I think
you're a little out to lunch on your "games" example. Most games use a
graphics library, typically either DirectX or OpenGL, to perform their scene
renderring, and that is where you find the heavy matrix manipulation (though it
is also used for the "physics" of the game, particularly for
"collison detection". Anyway, in the scene renderring, there is a lot
of transformation, using matrix manipulation, but it is just littered with
opportunities for "special tricks". First off, transformation matrices
in graphics are 4x4, but one of the rows is typically (0,0,0,1). The final
column is actually the translation vector and multiplication of a vector by such
a matrix performs rotation, scaling, inversion AND translation in one operation.
Anyway, multiply a matrix (or vector, although these days that is mostly done by
the graphics hardware) by the (0,0,0,1) row is fairly trivial. Next, matrices
are usually initialized with a "load identity" function.
Multiplication by the identity is easy, n'est pas? If you only apply scaling to
this matrix, you will still have a diagonal matrix, also fairly easy to
manipulate. So you have at least three classes of matrix that have accelerated
multiplications, as well as the general. Keeping track of the classes of the
matrices involved in operations allow for specialized multiplication functions
to be called when they are multiplied together.

Finally, the operation of loading the transformation matrix onto the card is
actually much more expensive (in time) than multiplying arbitrary matrices, to
getting that right is actually far more important than optimizing matrix
multiplication (the PCI/AGP bus is a lot slower than processor cache access, and
in a matrix multiplication the data is pretty much guaranteed to be loaded into
the cache for most of the operation, and the same is likely true for the matrix
multiplication code during most of a scene render).

Cheers, Colin

[ Reply to This | # ]

IBM Canada linux guy
Authored by: davamundo on Friday, February 03 2006 @ 12:43 PM EST
I read that "One of the audience members was the person responsible for Linux within IBM Canada" .. who is that guy ?

(I WISH I had been able to get to Hamilton for that meeting)

The reason I ask is that I run a little operation, here in Toronto, called linuxcaffe. We're a community hub, a meeting place for all sorts of open source geeks, a source for many different linux (and BSD) distros, and peddlers of some damn fine organic espresso, and I'd like to locate IBM Canadas numero uno penguin population person. (and Robert Young, RMS, ESR, Mark Shuttleworth and Linus, of course)

I'd also like to take another opportinity to shout out to PJ, you are one of my heros, A shining example of the power of openness. I like your style ! If you are ever in Toronto you MUST visit linuxcaffe, we carry your torch !

all fer now, djp



[ Reply to This | # ]

Report on Hamilton, Canada LUG Special Session on SCO v. IBM
Authored by: mexaly on Friday, February 03 2006 @ 01:48 PM EST
clicky

The link above says Oracle lawyers talked with SCO lawyers, and that Oracle finds the subpoena defective (and gives the reasons why).

---
My thanks go out to PJ and the legal experts that make Groklaw great.

[ Reply to This | # ]

Report on Hamilton, Canada LUG Special Session on SCO v. IBM
Authored by: talexb on Friday, February 03 2006 @ 10:33 PM EST
John MacDonald wrote the lead article on this one, and a few others have
contributed. What follows are some of my rough notes, quickly punched into my
Blackberry. I've added a few bits in brackets to clarify my original comments.

------------------------

Peter Salus: Review of chronology of the lawsuits. Working for Cravath Swaine
since 2003 as Unix historian.

Bob Young: Any lawyers? One.

Linus' secret for E-Mail .. Send to /dev/null .. If it's important they'll send
it again.

No longer a director of RH, so not officially a RH comment.

Started Linux Journal in early 90's.

After Second (World) War, patents were 20 years. Mickey Mouse copyright story
(Congress, won't you please extend this copyright? OK, again?). (Patents are
now) 70 years after death of creator. Sonny Bono and the chair argument. (I'm
just passing the chair down to my children and grandchildren. One of the
distinguished panelists offers to sing "I've Got You, Babe".)

(The reason behind) Charles Dickens serializing his stories (he got paid for
each chapter -- books were just copied by all the printers in town because there
was no copyright protection).

(As of) 1976 (authours) no longer have to put (c) on their items (thus, people
who want to use something have no way of finding out who the copyright owner is
-- worse, use it without checking and you could face a lawsuit).

Creative Commons copyright (.org web site)

Peter: mentions his articles are under the CC license.

Ren Buckholz: EFF (representative) in Toronto. Overview of EFF. IP originally a
lever to promote R and D, now (it's) a landmine.

Peter: review af American copyright and patent law. Diagrams and working models
required till 1978. Patent appeals discussion, patent examiners rewarded for
awarding patents. No patents, no rewards.

Bob: Video camera patent from 1963 (from some guy watching a football game and
doodling). (First production video camera wasn't produced till more than ten
years later -- then the patent holder sued and won.)

Peter: (Review of) RIM and NTP case.

Ren: Toronto High Park MP voted out (Very interesting, but is covered in much
better detail elsewhere.)

Peter: Michael Geist best Canadian on patent and copyright.
(Relative size of recording and technology companies.)
IBM and their 20 billion quarterly revenues ..

(My question about Stats on Groklaw .. Peter referred to webmaster since that's
not a legal research issue.)

Bob: (Was) Selling HW whose cost is dropping and OS cost is shooting up .. (it
occurred to him that there) Must be an entrepreneurial opportunity there. (And
founded Red Hat.)

Peter: How insane copyright length as it relates to music.

Ren on DVD rights.

(Some discussion on IBM patents .. Defensive move and IBM has donated patents
..)

Bob: 100,000 patents (are registered) a year, (at a cost of) $20,000 each,
(that's) 2.5 billion (dollars). Votes trump money.

Peter: Canadian patent law (C-60) may die or the Conservatives may follow it
up.

Ren: Compared to other International laws, it's (C-60) way better.

Bob: (Comments about) red tape, IP, PJ O'Rourke, Hong Kong (booming, little red
tape) and Bangledesh (stagnant, way too much red tape).

------------------------

I had a chance to meet Peter Salus briefly at the break; a very jovial fellow,
but very modest about his little articles. He said he had the next chapter of
his serial 'in his head' and just needed to get it down to the computer, but
he'd been so busy lately. John MacDonald (who had been talking with Peter) and I
both explained we'd been busy fighting plumbing problems at home -- we actually
ran into each over the weekend at Home Depot buying plumbing parts. Small
world.


Terrific meeting -- I'm glad I went.

T. Alex Beamish
(These comments published under the Creative Commons license -- if it works for
Peter Salus, it works for me.)

[ Reply to This | # ]
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