The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Editorial Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au

I read with fascination a Borland (USA) press release that read in part:

User group organizations from across the country, representing thousands of individual consumers of personal computer software, today filed an amicus curiae, or "friend-of-the-court," brief with the Federal District Court in Boston, in response to a ruling last week in the software copyright case brought by Lotus Development Corporation against Borland International Inc. The brief advocates an immediate appeal of the rulings by the District Court in the case.

In a decision last week, the court held that Borland's key reader feature, a compatibility component of Borland's spreadsheet product that reads a user's own keystrokes and custom computer programs or macros, infringes on the copyright of Lotus 1-2-3.

The brief was filed by the Capital PC User Group (Washington DC), Long Island PC Users Group, Sacramento PC Users Group (California), Twin Cities User Group (Minnesota), the Kentucky-Indiana Personal Computer Users Group, the Pinellas IBM PC User Group (Florida), Central Florida Computer Society and the Santa Barbara (Calif.) PC User Group. Hundreds of such organizations meet on a regular basis around the country, providing a clear voice for the interests of personal computer users.

According to the brief, the user groups and the thousands of consumers they represent are concerned about the extent to which the copyright law may be used to restrict the ability of one software package to be compatible with another. Computer users, says the brief, "have a common interest in the availability of compatible software products."

The brief cites a decision last year by the 2nd Circuit Federal Court of Appeals that recognized that software compatibility "saves users costs, both in time and money, that otherwise would be expended in purchasing new programs, modifying existing systems to run them, and gaining familiarity with their operation."

As a consequence of this collective user group action, Borland has been able to file an immediate appeal in this three-year-old case. A damages trial has also been scheduled for 3 October 1994, by which time the appeal should have been heard. See the authorised reprints of InfoWorld and PC Week elsewhere in this issue.

Australian User Groups

Unfortunately Australian user group officials have had little contact with each other other than at an annual meeting. I'd like to see us do something for our members one day along the lines of the American user groups.

Even local vendors sometimes don't know how to work with us beyond the monthly meeting presentations. If this were the United States, you would have seen the launch of every major Microsoft product by Bill Gates himself, who chooses user group meetings for the honour.

Are we perceived to be unstable, indecisive, politically embroiled bodies? Who knows, but I have one answer - we are users first: active, interested users; perhaps we can be contrasted with the users who buy commercial magazines irregularly We're working on this issue.

Sharing Information

I was looking at the Project Gutenberg CD-ROM the other day My mind wandered off, trying to envisage how we will manage the ever-increasing volumes of information that we seem to churn out.

Project Gutenberg is a nonprofit scheme wherein people donate their time to key in the text of written works whose copyrights have expired. That includes departed souls such as Milton, Shakespeare, Carroll, and dozens more.

Although a CD-ROM is a convenient way of storing hundreds of such electronic texts (E-texts) in plain ASCII format, the project enables millions of Internet users to retrieve the same texts from the archive site.

A drawback of plain ASCII in this particular instance is that you cannot indicate any emphasis or include any pictorial or sound information. There are encoding schemes that overcome these limitations but Project Gutenberg aims to get E-texts to the widest possible audience, unfettered by platform limitations.

The worthy aim of this project fails in my view in another quarter. Although we have millions of people sharing this freely available information, we are replicating the same material millions of times when a copy is made on a reader's computer. Sometimes the project's server may be down; sometimes only so many people can access it at once - it would take a long time for a million people to get a turn.

Is the answer multiple text databases, each keeping only a fraction of the total library? Would someone like to write an article that addresses this challenge (not that of Project Gutenberg but of information sharing itself)?

September Meeting

If you are interested in multimedia and missed our last monthly meeting, you missed a treat. Graeme Ambrose of Graphic Decisions (03) 820 3433 explained in depth the pitfalls of tackling this technology and that helped us appreciate the bells and whistles in his great presentation and in those from IBM and Microsoft later that night. Graphic Decisions makes quality audio-visual presentations for clients and they know their stuff. Graeme used the YdeoShow Presenter, which is a hand-held remote-control device with a tiny colour monitor that enables you to control your PC slide show without looking at the big

Apology to Author

In the August issue we incorrectly attributed the review of The Electronic Law Book - Corporations Law to Barbara Melville, when it happened to be the work of Patricia Melville. Please accept our apologies, Patricia.

Reprinted from the October 1993 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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