The economy of the future will be based on relationship rather than possession.
- John Perry Barlow.
Maybe we can continue another very small step along that path that we started when we stopped using violence to settle or to decide things, and moved on to using money.
- Tim Berners-Lee.
Money doesn't exist in the twenty-fourth century.
- Jean-Luc Picard, ST8.
Without such tools and freedoms there was little opportunity for people to employ a socio-economics like this. Only a handful of small-scale historical enterprises exhibit a similarity: one colorful but disreputable example was the 17-18th century society of the Brethren of the Coast.
The motivation for originating this system was to develop an economics that embodied philosophical Taoism as expressed by Lao Tse. Although generally interpreted in other contexts, Lao's ancient Chinese poem is useful as a strategic guide to the equally venerable game of Wei Qi, best known today by its Japanese name, Go. The rules of Go, which match pieces called Stones in a space of competing configurations, were the starting point for the mechanism of the Stone Society.
A Stone Society is one whose Charter accomodates the elements and mechanisms described below. The Stone Society does not entail any particular ethics, scope, or purpose; it's a tool to be employed by many different kinds of society in many different contexts.
Each Officer of a Stone Society may originate only a finite number of Stones. For the purposes of a democracy, all Officers will originate the same number of Stones. Meritocratic societies such as a university or the crew of a ship may allocate their Stones in proportion to the market value of the duties undertaken by their Officers.
The duties of a Commission require acceptance of some legislative code or compact. In societies dedicated to operational purposes, such as the function of a ship, these duties may include practical requirements and contingent chains of command. Some Stone Societies may also allow "Non-Commissioned Officers" to hold Stones, participate in Services, or bid at Auctions without their accepting a Commission.
A Service overrides control of its Resources to the extent described in its Service Contract. It may not override the effects of any article of the Charter of its Society, nor may it override the effects of any of its Society's Auctions. Any remedy for the interruption of a Service by an Auction must be explicitly prescribed in the corresponding Service Contract.
An Auction starts from scratch when an Officer of a Stone Society proposes new policies, courses of action, assignments of Resources, Commissions or social conventions for the Society. Cloned Auctions are appropriate when an Officer feels the Preferences of some existing Auctions are not mutually-exclusive in some case, or that there is some significant ambiguity in resolving the outcomes of previously existing Auctions. By either method, the new Auction starts with all its Preferences ranked at zero.
Auctions entail mutually exclusive Preferences but further Preferences may be added at any time. A Society's Charter may define some ante conditions for the origination of new Auctions and Preferences, such as that these would only be accepted along with some significant first bid of Stones.
An extra Preference, known as a "donkey", is presented to bidders at the head of each Auction's list of Preferences. The effect of each donkey would be to cancel its Auction entirely. Because Auctions may never exceed the parameters of their Society's Charter, if a Society's Charter is effectively defined then most vexatious or trivial Auctions may be ruled out without resort to donkeys.
When more than one Auction is in dispute at the end of a Term, end-of-Term bidding is conducted in parallel for all disputed Auctions. The Term does not finish, new Quanta do not take effect, and bid Stones are not recycled until the end-of-Term process is complete for all of a Society's Auctions.
The effect of the Quantum of a particular Auction will often outlive that Quantum. Commitment of a Society to a contractual arrangment, the offer or extinction of its Commissions, and various physical effects of Quanta may not be readily altered. This is similar to the effect that personal decisions have on the circumstances of an individual; though a commitment may be regretted, the Quantum that represents it reversed, the persistence of its effect will often affect a Society as an ongoing circumstance.
A Society of automated agents controlling a machine might be appropriately responsive only when it employs a Term of nanoseconds. A small Society of humans will likely employ Terms of days, with contingent exceptions defined by means of sub-Societies (defined below). A Society of nations might require Terms of a year or more, and some future Stone Society, with Officers at far-flung relativistic distances, might employ Terms of decades and centuries. Each Stone Society will employ a Term that coordinates its operation without unduly distressing its Officers.
Unless described within a Society's Charter, the form of each Commission is defined by means of a Commission Definition Auction ("CDA"). Each CDA describes necessary qualifications, attendant responsibilities, conditions of discharge, and other requirements.
A subsequent Auction, a Commission Recruitment Auction (CRA), selects candidates for the Commission. Each candidate's qualifications and asking price in new Stones will be represented as a Preference in the CRA, with its donkey Preference having the effect of rejecting all candidates.
When the CRA completes its Term, formal offers are extended to the preferred candidates. If an offer is accepted, a group of Stones is created for each new Officer when they accept the duties of the Commission.
A Officer of a Society may resign or may be discharged from their Commission depending on its details, the circumstances, and the Charter of the Society. If penalties are to attend termination of a Commission, these must have been detailed in the description of the Commission before it was accepted.
Involuntary termination is effected by a Commission Termination Auction (CTA). Conditions on the creation of a CTA, including its range of Preferences, will be specified in the Society's Charter and the original CDA. A donkey Preference of the CTA has the effect of cancelling it, and the relevant CDA and Charter may specify double-jeopardy restrictions on subsequent CTAs. Conditions on the creation of a CTA may also include numbers and qualifications of Officers proposing the CTA, approval by Contextual Societies, standards of evidence, rights of appeal to external courts, and so on.
Stones originated by a de-Commissioned person are deactivated in this way: any of their original Stones remaining in their possession are immediately cancelled; their original Stones not in their possession are simply not recycled when next bid at Auction. De-Commissioning does not affect a person's possession of the Stones of others unless specified by the relevant CDA or Charter.
The Stones of a Contextual Society, "Contextual Stones", are controlled within a Sub-Society by the same means that control all the Sub-Society's Resources: by Auctions of the Sub-Society's Stones. Resources involved in a Contextual Society may be controlled as per its Charter only by means of its Contextual Stones. So long as the Charters of interacting societies are closely defined, and the scoping of such societies permits no loops, these arrangements may be managed by means of the standard Stone mechanisms.
Note that, to the extent permitted by a Sub-Society's Commission within a Contextual Society, the Contextual Society may permanently remove Resources from or otherwise coerce the Sub-Society.
It will still be possible that the true identities of Stone Society participants may be protected; they may be known to one another solely as cryptographically protected pseudonyms. But their operations within the Society cannot be hidden from one another if the proper function of the Society is to be assured.
The flow of information between a Stone Society and persons outside it, however, may be secured by any means that the Society sees fit to install. The discretion of Officers of a Society can be secured by means of conditions attached to their Commissions. The physical flow of bits between Officers can be secured by public key cryptography. Just as a person, a Society should be able to share any of its information with external agencies, or not, as only it sees fit.
In the case of Subsidiary Stone Societies, described above, the Charters of Contextual Societies will make explicit reference to any information sharing/hiding obligations in their Commissions. It should thus be straightforward to construct hierarchies of Stone Societies as appropriate to the security of any cooperative endeavour.
This issue must be addressed explicitly in a Society's Charter. Limitations on numbers and types of Commissions and careful definition of standards of duty of Officers to their Society must be carefully designed to detect and mitigate abuses of franchise.
In a Stone Charter, antitrust restrictions may be as simple as time limits on the possession of non-original Stones. Stones paid for a Service wouldn't be available to the sellers forever, but would instead be recycled a certain number of Terms after they were paid, or even at the end of the same Term in which they were paid, whether or not they were bid in an Auction.
Executing multi-Term and multi-stage Services under such restrictions would require a negotiation process similar to the the method by which virtual circuits are set up under an ATM communications protocol. Stone market effects would tend to optimize the arrangement of such Service stages even before the negotiated Services commenced. More likely, however, is that such complex relationships will actually be conducted by a combination of new Commissions and sub-societies.
Stone Societies permit a remarkable efficiency with regard to taxes. If a Society is to implement centralized or public-service oriented agencies (usually as sub-Societies) these may be funded directly by the Stones attached to a Commission. Each agency's budget is thereby allocated without the need to levy taxes on other enterprises or on the property and incomes of the Society's Officers.
Stone torts occur when Officers of the Society intentionally interfere with the effects of the Society's Quanta, Commissions, or Services by coercion, fraud, theft, censorship, dereliction, violence or other force. In principle, such Officers are liable to restitute their Society to an extent determined by the value of the effects they disrupt.
In the case of a Quantum, this will be the number of Stones represented in the Quantum multiplied by the number of Terms in which the interference occurs. In the case of a Commission, this will be the number of Stones awarded in the Commission multiplied by the number of Terms during which the interference occurs. In both these cases the injured party is the Society as a whole, so restitution, garnished from the offender's account until paid in full, is simply recycled as if it had been bid at an Auction.
In the case of a Service, restitution is the number of Stones exchanged in the Service Contract over the period of the interference. This being an offence against the purchasers of the Service rather than against the Society as a whole, this restitution is paid proportionally to the parties who paid for the Service.
If an Officer is unwilling or unable to make restitution as prescribed here - in the case, for example, where the value of the restitution is greater than they could possibly pay - a Society may further see fit to expel them. In such cases, as with forms of interference originating outside the Society, diplomatic remedies and precautions may then be applied.
A Stone judiciary must provide structures for formal legal processes involving disputants, witnesses and advocates. It may be that these processes will involve no delegated authorities, and that Stone judgements may be rendered by Auction. It may be, however, that such an arrangement would itself produce an avenue for the application of preemptive force unless persons prejudiced against one or another party in a dispute could be excluded from the Auction. This being the case, delegation of judgemental authority to a Contextual Society may be unavoidable.
Although the structure of the legal process of a Stone Society will be peculiar to that society, Stone judiciaries should entail some roles that can be identified here. One such is that of an Advocate - someone whose purpose is to gather and present evidence for or against various Preferences in a Stone Auction. Another is a Moderator - something like the role of a judge, but with no power of decision - a quality-assurance job to ensure that appropriate presentations, standards of evidence, and qualification of jurors are met. These roles will weigh heavily, and likely be assigned by Commission.
A Stone Society, as described above, holds its Officers criminally accountable only to the extent specified by their Commissions. People who are not Officers might still be held accountable if a society maintains reciprocity with societies that do have them as an Officer. Sanctions against persons who do not thereby fall within a Society's jurisdiction cannot be described as legal sanctions: they must properly be thought of as acts of diplomacy.
The Stone Society seems secure against contemporary failings because it employs methods of consensual participation instead of delegated authority. This is not to say that problems can't arise when Stone Societies are put into use; a poorly defined Stone Charter might produce any kind of social monstrosity. The potential benefits of Stone Societies, however, are easily appreciated in the light of present-day failings.
Participants in Stone Societies who misrepresent their Services must subsequently succumb to hostile bids from those they mislead. Participants concerned with ecological or social interdependence can link these issues directly to the pricing of development policies. Many traditional forms of disinformation should therefore be impractical under a Stone Society.
Under a Stone Society, no resource is irrevocably controlled. Market responsibility is required at all times if control of a resource is to be maintained. Likewise, exclusive control policies, while feasible, will be much less stable than arrangements for resources to be shared; shared usage Preferences will gain more support bids and less opposition bids in Auction than exclusive Preferences, and so must predominate. Resource sharing is wholely market-defined, however, and so will not degenerate to collective resource management except when market-forces actually prefer this.
Intentional hierarchies are practicable under a Stone Society. This is just as well, as organizations that must be tightly controlled, such as military forces, are best ordered by chains of command. Spontaneous generation of hierarchies, however, will be discouraged under a Stone Society, as authority can neither be obtained nor delegated except by market forces. So Stone-based organizations will determine their structures fluidly according to changing circumstances.
Officers of a Stone Society do not employ representatives, but determine policy directly. While Stone Societies may Commission administrators, these will neither serve as representatives nor benefit by conspiring in parties.
Stone Societies, for the most part, may operate as meritocracies. The security of any administrator under a Stone Society depends entirely on that Society's satisfaction with their performance, as expressed by Auction. Any administrator that does not satisfy their Society will swiftly find themselves out of a job.
Under a Stone Society, such forms of influence are no longer privileged. Every Officer of a Stone Society can use their economic franchise to directly and equitably influence political decisions without any effect of impropriety. When political influence is not privileged, no influence can be "undue".
Such systemic abstractions play no part in the mechanism of Stone Societies because Stones are grounded in common perceptions of opportunity and resource. Activities that monopolize resources, or that do not hold out tangible benefit to a Society, will not pay; in fact, due to hostile bids, these activities should result in considerable losses.
Although deeply flawed, traditional socio-economics is not all bad. In fact it enables more people to enjoy material security and productive endeavour than ever before in history. If there is to be a resolution of the failures described here it must represent evolution from rather than revolution against present day socio-economics. Picard says of the Star Trek utopia: "The accumulation of wealth is no longer the driving force: we work to better ourselves and humanity." If it is at all practicable, the Stone Society may provide a stepping-stone towards the realization of this ideal.
Origination of capital and authority under a Stone Society derives from social consensus moderated by a Charter, a compact explicitly accepted by each Officer of the Society. Capital and authority need never be delegated because they are expressed systematically in the Stone Society mechanism. Auctions qualify and Stones quantify all political and economic force, and access to these means are directly available to every Officer in the Society.
Social policy and control of Resources are never exclusively or preemptively determined under a Stone Society because they are subject to a process of continual review by Auction. Control of a Resource can only occur within a limited context and timeframe, and control is readily transferred or mitigated if another use of the Resource becomes more appropriate to a Society's changing circumstances.
Implementation of a Stone Society can be entirely decentralized because Stones are created and validated by cryptographic consensus rather than by hierarchical authority. A Stone Society creates capital systematically when it creates new Officers, and this capital is validated systematically as a part of the mechanism by which every Stone transaction proceeds.
An Auction can resolve political as readily as economic dispositions. Because of this it is incumbent on the possessor of Stones to consider the real costs of applying them to political rather than economic ends. Political decisions are thereby explicitly represented and equitably priced in an economic context.
Garrett Hardin coined the term "Tragedy of the Commons" in a 1968 article by that name in the journal SCIENCE (162:1243-1248). Simply put, the tragedy is an observation that it is to an individual's advantage to exploit a shared resource as thoroughly as possible, and that the implementation of this strategy by many individuals leads to an exhaustion of the resource.
Commonses (for want of a better plural) exist within most corporate environments. Conference rooms, car fleets, furniture, staff, real estate and many other resources are, notionally, shared among multiple groups. In practice, however, these resources are not shared, but instead appropriated by ad-hoc feudal, bureaucratic and even socialistic systems set up by management and by convention.
The corporate use of Stone Societies to manage these shared resources may give rise to significant gains in business efficiency and consequent productivity, as well as generally alleviating much of the management burden associated with corporate growth.
An Officer who hoards or wastes their Society's Resources will experience a direct cost associated with this as hostile bids against their continuing access to the Resource. Because Resource control is not exclusive or preemptive, monopolistic or wasteful Resource control policies can not be economically competitive under a Stone Society against shared, sustainable policies.
Furthermore, because Quanta can represent Resource-sharing policies in the marketplace, Resources that may be naturally managed as commonses, such as environmental and digital resources, will obtain protection according to their real value qua commons. While this will not cure the wholesale waste of digital opportunity and ecological habitat that continues under the existing regime, the Stone Society provides a path towards rational management of ecological and information resources in the future.
Traditional economic systems are predicated upon scarcity. Without scarcity they have no way to establish prices, and without prices there's no way to turn a profit or incur a debt. Without profits and debts, traditional economics provides no motivation for cooperative endeavour. The experience of chaotic fluctuations in existing market processes dramatically illustrates this shortcoming.
Resources under a Stone Society are priced according to popular consensus of the opportunities they present, providing a standard for price that does not depend on estimations of scarcity. The pricing of a commons, such as the freeware digital resources on the web, which do not fit a scarcity-based socioeconomic model, can be realistically determined by these means. The use of a Stone Society by digital content developers will enable cooperation in ways that at present are either impractical or unscalable.
Furthermore there is considerable speculation among engineers concerning the imminent impact of molecular nanotechnology on global economic processes. One of the benefits that nanotech may deliver is the ability to digitally replicate, molecule for molecule, almost any physical object. This replication will be limited by access to energy, but nanotech also promises to deliver clean energy in great abundance. Because Stone economics are driven purely by perceptions of opportunity and resource, and Stone wealth is predicated on social consensus, Stone Societies will remain practicable even in a nanotech world of plenty.
Representative socioeconomics employs coercive and inequitable means for pricing restitution and administration. Restitution obtained by the combination of suit and insurance does not function with reference to the market price of resources and relationships. Taxation does not function by reference to market demand for public institutions. The Stone Society, by representing restitution and administration directly in the marketplace, determines their price without the inefficiency and bureaucratic overhead of taxes and insurance premiums.
Representative democracy and representative markets employ far more numerous and complex abstractions than the Stone Society, requiring vast tomes of legislative patches and special cases to cover the same ground. The configuration space of present-day socioeconomics is far from recursively enumerable, where the configuration space of a Stone Society should be not only recursively enumerable but even defined as a mathematical Group.
Scale symmetries are similarities between the parts of a system and the whole. Such symmetries abound in nature, providing an interconnectedness that is absent from much human enterprise. By their provisioning for sub-Societies, by the identity between the mechanism of their components and the mechanism of their context, and by their feasible extension to the control of automata, Stone Societies possess scale symmetries that are not realizable under other socio-economic system.
Routing in telecommunications networks and distributed databases is a difficult problem that is being addressed via socio-economic mechanisms. These mechanisms being commonly based on delegated authority, however, centralization of authentication and a systematic trend towards the concentration of capital present grave design issues. A Stone Society may be an ideal solution to these problems.
Inducing cooperative behaviour in the independent components of Operating Systems, SCADA and AI applications, and making that behaviour scale, are difficult problems. A Stone Society may provide both a method for approaching these problems and a framework within which their solutions can be implemented.
Maintaining business focus and ensuring effective business communications, especially when businesses grow rapidly, are difficult problems that affect large and small enterprises all over the world. Stone Societies could provide decision support and management infrastructure with significant competitive advantages for many kinds of business.
Providing a socio-economic basis for the Internet is a very difficult problem. While the net is our most effective tool for forming communities and disseminating information on a global scale, it provides practically no means for agreeing on policies or coordinating developments. Stone Societies may provide this means too.
Resolving conflict requires concord between the representatives of the factions engaged in it. These representatives may, for personal or partisan reasons, be indisposed towards concord. So warfare drags on for years, even after the subject of dispute has been obliterated.
Because the Stone Society permits popular forces to usurp political and resource control without bloodshed, it may alleviate many causes of warfare. By means of Auctions and Contextual Societies, Stone Societies can help members of different cultures to directly define treaties to share resources and contain cultural differences. Violent dispute might therefore be less likely to arise and be resolved more easily.
Most engineering groups today live as semi-autonomous entities within larger marketing and distribution enterprises. It is very common for different commercial enterprises to carry on almost identical engineering projects, often without recognition that their opportunities and methods duplicate those of their peers.
The result is wasted endeavour and a repeating cycle of development and extinction of proprietary tools. The tool that succeeds under this regime is not the one best suited to the task, but the one best marketed - the one about which customers are best disinformed. When a poor tool is promoted successfully, the social cost in terms of efficiency and productivity may be prodigious.
Groups like the FSF, the Internet Society, the Linux community, and the many independent creators of Internet content have produced fine tools at no cost to the user. Their efforts, however, proceed haphazardly, with no formal method for identifying requirements and coordinating separate developments.
Stone Societies may be useful to freeware and commercial content providers as means of coordinating resources in strategic partnerships. They may be used to define and reinforce standards, to replace middle-management and to provide developers with an appropriate voice in corporate decisions.
To employ a Stone Society does not require any alteration to pre-existing socioeconomics. A Stone Society may be set up as a means of managing resources and making decisions within an automaton, a human group, or as a compact between pre-existing groups without challenging or competing against any corporate or socioeconomic context. In fact, a Stone Society may be especially useful as a method of managing capitalist resources, including cash, and should interoperate and integrate seamlessly with existing democratic methods.
These three models correspond in this design with three programs that work together to implement a Stone Society. These are the Stone Client ("SC"), the Stone Engine ("SE"), and the Stone Auditor ("SA").
An SC is a Java Bean or similar componentware that will integrate with the Netscape Navigator, Microsoft Internet Explorer and other clients. It manages interfaces between users, third party components and one or more Stone Societies. The SC runs on the users' computers and communicates with SEs via standard Internet communication and database protocols, most likely TCP under RMI, CORBA, and/or Voyager. The SC is capable of dealing with the SEs of many different Stone Societies simultaneously.
An SE is a server or servlet that maintains a database of Stones, Officers, Accounts, Auctions and Services that represent a particular Stone Society. The SE program includes provision for fault-tolerance, load sharing and multi-tier scalability; many SE processes may be hooked together in networks to properly service a growing Stone Society. These networks behave, from the viewpoint of an SC or SA, as a single SE, so no distinction is made below between a single SE and a network of them.
An SA is a Java Bean or similar componentware that obtains audit records from one or more SEs and cryptographically verifies their integrity. The SA employs the same communication facilities that SCs use to deal with SEs; its role is to serve the audit requirements of the Authentication model described here.
Multiple instances of these processes work together to implement each Society's Auctions and Services. Each Stone Society deploys at least one SE, and each Officer in the Society deploys an SC and one or more SAs.
Each Preference also has a Rank determined either by the initial conditions or by Auction in the Society's previous Term. An Auction, its Preferences and their Ranks are maintained in the Society's SE database.
Each Term, SCs send bid transactions to their Society's SEs. These transactions are verified as per the Authentication model below. The SE accepts bid transactions until the end of the Term, modifying the appropriate Ranks as it goes. End-Of-Term bidding ensues until the SE possesses no Auction whose Quantum has switched Preferences in the previous three rounds of bidding.
When this occurs, the Term ends. No further bids are accepted until the new Term; the Society's Quanta are re-evaluated, audit data is published for validation by SAs, all bid Stones are recycled to their Officers' accounts, and all SCs are notified of the start of the new Term.
Most Auctions do not have predefined limits on the number of rounds they may continue; exceptions to this are the CDA, CRA and CTA.
The CDA begins when Officers, via their SCs and the Society's SE, define Preferences for the duties and conditions to be associated with the Commission. The CDA's Donkey Preference permits Officers to bid against the whole existence of the Commission. The effect of the CDA, if it achieves an effect, is to scope a CRA in a subsequent Term in combination with whatever conditions are placed on Commissions by the Society's Charter.
The Society's Officers use their SCs to nominate a number of persons or Resource suppliers for the CRA, identified cryptographically, whom they believe can fulfill its Commission. These nominations will formally specify the number of the Society's Stones that must be created or Resource access traded to obtain the services of the persons and Resources in each nomination. The CRA's Donkey Preference permits the Society's Officers to bid against all the nominated Preferences. Nominations are authenticated cryptographically.
The effect of the CRA, if it has an effect, is the issue of Invitations to the winning candidates. These Invitations are good for a number of Terms defined either by the Commission's first Auction or by the Society's Charter; if Invitations are not accepted within the specified period then they're cancelled. Invitations and their Acceptance are also authenticated cryptographically.
If an offered Commission goes unfilled, the process must begin all over again with the CDA. Bids and Preferences addressed to a CDA or CRA after the end of their Terms are not accepted and have no effect.
In fact, all conditions on a CTA, including its range of Preferences, are specified in the relevant CDA and Charter. CTAs will each include a Donkey Preference that will cancel the CTA. Conditions on the creation of a CTA may include numbers and qualifications for Officers proposing the CTA, approval by Contextual Societies, standards of evidence, rights of appeal to external courts, etc.
The weakest link in this model is the generation of the SEs' administrative keys; it is easily conceivable that a rogue administrator might crack these keys. There are, however, only two uses for such a crack, and both of them are readily detected:
The SC user interface should be almost entirely non-modal, permitting an Officer to view whichever of its reports is convenient while still observing the progress of a Society's processes. The SC user interface will also include provision for preemption, interrupting the Officer when it detects events in which he has previously defined an interest.
An Officer can use his SC to obtain reports on:
An Officer can use his SC to contribute to:
Many ancillary functions must also be catered to by an SC, mainly to do with the proper administration and maintenance of a Society and its SEs, and to coordinate the Quanta of the Society with the actual functions of its Resources.
Nevertheless, Stones has been intended from the start as an evolutionary rather than a revolutionary system. It is supposed to complement existing socioeconomics, which includes among its many flaws the existence of software patents. I don't believe I can expect to safeguard the development of Stones without some ability to play in this arena.
The intention now is to license the idea itself and the Stones software as free for non-commercial use. By this I mean that, most uses would be copyleft and patentleft - only inclusion/interfacing to proprietary software and deployment to manage commercial enterprises will likely require a commercial license. And by patentleft I mean that any software released under a GPL would get a free license.
It has been lately suggested that Stones should properly own itself; that licensing of The Stone Society should be controlled by A Stone Society. I like this notion too, but I expect Stone Societies will come in a great many stripes, none of which we can properly anticipate right now. I don't want to recapitulate Camelot just yet, but eventually it seems inevitable ...
Anyway the patent will only affect US usage. If you're using this stuff elsewhere you shouldn't need to trouble yourself beyond concerns with copyright. And good luck to you!
[A quick update on this: as of 9/99 several of the original patent claims have been approved by the uspto. A CIP is in progress and links to the uspto stuff will go in here when the thing issues.]