W8SDZ@SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL (Keith Petersen) (10/05/88)
In a recent response to Apple's "Look and Feel" lawsuit, HP maintained that the Mac's graphical interface is based on work done by other companies - in particular, Xerox Corp. HP's filing further alledged that Apple obtained copyright registrations on the screen display fraudulently by not disclosing to the U.S. Copyright Office that the Mac's display was derived from Xerox's work. > "In copyrights and patents, if there is prior art, it has to be reported > at submission", said Bob Frankenberg, group general manager for the > information systems group at HP. "Prior art, whether protected or in > the public domain, can make your patent or copyright invalid." This is an interesting turn of events. If this is upheld by the court it could invalidate the copyrights of all shareware and commercial programs which contain a substantial amount of public domain code. I wonder how that would affect the SEA vs. PKWare suit? Would it make ZOO's copyright invalid? How about all the copyrighted file transfer programs out there which use the Ward Christensen protocol (popularly called XMODEM) and all those YMODEM and ZMODEM programs based on Chuck Forsberg's PD code? LONG LIVE PUBLIC DOMAIN! Maintainer of the CP/M and MSDOS archives at SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL [26.0.0.74] Arpa: W8SDZ@SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL Uucp: {ames,decwrl,harvard,rutgers,ucbvax,uunet}!simtel20.army.mil!w8sdz
johnl@ima.ima.isc.com (John R. Levine) (10/05/88)
In article <KPETERSEN.12435888308.BABYL@SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL> W8SDZ@SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL (Keith Petersen) writes: >> "In copyrights and patents, if there is prior art, it has to be reported >> at submission", said Bob Frankenberg, group general manager for the >> information systems group at HP. "Prior art, whether protected or in >> the public domain, can make your patent or copyright invalid." > >This is an interesting turn of events. If this is upheld by the court >it could invalidate the copyrights of all shareware and commercial >programs which contain a substantial amount of public domain code. When you register a copyright there is a place on the form where they ask about previous work on which the current work is based. You have to identify what is new and what is pre-existing. It is entirely legitimate to copyright something based partially or entirely based on previous work, even public domain previous work, so long as there is appreciable new creative work. The copyright protects only the new stuff, not the old. To address the original question, if Apple was foolish enough to copyright their screens and claim that they were 100% new, they could indeed be in trouble. If they admitted that they were derived from Xerox's work, their copyright is probably entirely secure. If you're interested, see "The Legal Guide to Computer Software Protection" by Thorne Harris III, published by Prentice-Hall, ISBN 0-13-528365-5. -- John R. Levine, IECC, PO Box 349, Cambridge MA 02238-0349, +1 617 492 3869 { bbn | think | decvax | harvard | yale }!ima!johnl, Levine@YALE.something Rome fell, Babylon fell, Scarsdale will have its turn. -G. B. Shaw
dhesi@bsu-cs.UUCP (Rahul Dhesi) (10/05/88)
In article <KPETERSEN.12435888308.BABYL@SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL> W8SDZ@SIMTEL20.ARMY.MIL (Keith Petersen) writes: >> "Prior art, whether protected or in >> the public domain, can make your patent or copyright invalid." ... >Would it make ZOO's copyright invalid? All the compression/decompression code in zoo is in separate files and already explicitly released to the public domain. -- Rahul Dhesi UUCP: <backbones>!{iuvax,pur-ee}!bsu-cs!dhesi