Angry Alliance Forming Against Software Suits

Business

Angry Alliance Forming Against Software Suits

Reuters
The San Francisco Chronicle

May 30, 1989

Boston Computer programmers, scientists and users are joining in an increasingly vocal alliance to battle industry giants who use copyright laws against computer software imitators.

The movement went public last week in Cambridge, Mass., when 150 protestors, ranging from prominent computer scientists to college students and company executives, marched on Lotus Development Corp., demanding that the company ""keep your lawyers off our computers."

They were taking issue with lawsuits that Lotus, Apple Computer Corp. of Cupertino, Calif., and Ashton-Tate Co. have filed to stop others from imitating what is called the ""look and feel" of software interfaces - the commands that allow a user to operate a computer program.

All the suits are pending, but industry analysts said they may already be having a chilling effect on sales of derivative programs, or clones.

In a new survey of 200 computer systems managers by the trade journal Computerworld, 30.5 percent of the respondents said the look-and-feel lawsuits will cause them to shy away from software clones.

The suits also have been condemned by large computer user groups around the country and by several trade organizations, who fear the litigation could stifle innovation and end U.S. dominance in one of the few high-tech sectors where it still reigns.

U.S. companies control 60 percent of the $55-billion-a-year world market for software.

Lotus, Apple and Ashton-Tate stirred up the controversy by taking smaller competitors to court on charges that the competitors imitated the look and feel of their interfaces, though not their programs as a whole.

The Goliaths have been attacked by the Davids ever since, for what they say is an attempt to stifle innovation through lawyers. ""No one every copyrighted cotton dress shirts this way," fumed Michael Shattow, president of Multitrak Software Development Corp. of Boston.

For most of the short history of the personal computer industry, programmers have purposely developed interfaces with a similar look and feel to others already established so users would not have to learn a whole new set of commands for each program.

The demonstrators argued that it is to everybody's advantage if interfaces are standardized, just as the steering wheel and brakes of a car are standardized.

Lotus responds that it is trying to protect its intellectual property.

""Copyright law has amply protected creativity without stifling innovation in other fields of intellectual endeavor, such as books and motion pictures, and we believe it can and will do the same for computer programs," the company said.

Lotus pioneered look-and-feel lawsuits in 1987 when it charged that Mosaic Software and Paperback Software, two companies that market spreadsheet programs similar to Lotus's bestselling 1-2-3, were violating its copyright by using the same interfaces.

Apple followed last year with a similar lawsuit against Hewlett-Packard Co. and Microsoft Corp., even though Microsoft had worked with Apple to develop much of the software used on Apple's Macintosh computer.

Ashton-Tate went even further in its suit against Fox Software Inc., claiming it owns not only the ""look and feel" of its dBase program, but also the computer language in which it was written and the file formats it uses.

Copyrights, traditionally used to protect books, plays and music, protect the expression of an idea, but cannot protect the idea. In software anyone can write a word processing program, but the underlying computer code must be different for each program. In other words, you can copyright a song about love, but it won't stop others from writing lovesongs.

The look and feel lawsuits take the copyright law a step further, charging a violation if a program uses a different computer code to produce the same result.

The phrase ""look and feel" was invented in 1985 by two California lawyers in an article about parts of software user interfaces that can be protected by copyright.

""There is no legal definition to look and feel yet - it all depends on what happens in these lawsuits," said Bryant Kocher, president of the trade group Association for Computing Machinery.

The demonstrators outside Lotus were particularly irked by what they said is the hypocrisy of those doing the suing.

""Lotus is trying to copyright ideas they didn't even come up with," said a marketing executive of a software publisher, referring to the fact that Lotus actually adapted the 1-2-3 interface from Visicalc before it acquired that company.

Programmers are even angrier at Apple, which claims that Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard copied graphic icons the Macintosh uses to represent commands, such as a garbage can to signify ""delete."

But in fact, all the user interfaces used on the Macintosh were pioneered by Xerox Corp.'s Parc research subsidiary in the 1970s, and variations on Parc's developments are used by dozens of companies in the computer industry, the protesters said.