papa@pollux.usc.edu (Marco Papa) (07/04/90)
I haven't seen anybody cover this, so I'll do it. The same day of the Amiga DevCon session on copyrights, patents and trademarks, a U.S court handed over a complete win to Lotus against an infringer of its 1-2-3 "look-and-feel". A decision of this wide range was at least partially unexpected. Two days later, Lotus sued Borland International over the cloning of 1-2-3's look and feel, as one of the optional User Interfaces of the Quattro spreadsheet. As a result of the suit, quite a number of "complete" Lotus clones running under UNIX will stop shipping altogether. Newspaper reports indicate that at least portions of the Lotus decisions can be used in Apple's favor against Microsoft and HP (though that lawsuit is quite different, since it also involves a prior licensing agreement between the parties). -- Marco -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= "Xerox sues somebody for copying?" -- David Letterman -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=