April 18, 1985: Court Says Apple Gave Permission for Copying

Apple had sued Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard for infringing on the Mac look and feel. There wasn't any contention that Microsoft had not blatantly copied Apple; the only question was, did they do it legally?

Apple maintained that they had not. They argued that the naked aping of Apple technology should be limited to the pathetic Windows 1.0. Microsoft felt, well, differently. They believed that anything they did that was derivative of Apple was fair game. The reason they felt empowered to blatantly steal Apple's ideas was due to a license granted to them by John Sculley.

In a lawsuit for the ages, the judge agreed with Microsoft, noting that while exact copying was bad, more general copying was okay. In the purest of legalese:
"[W]hen similar features in a videogame [-- a work viewed as closely analogous to a GUI --] are '"as a practical matter indispensable, or at least standard, in the treatment of a given [idea]," 'they are treated like ideas and are therefore not protected by copyright. Furthermore, ... 'the mere __dispensable__ expression of these ideas, based on the technical requirements of the videogame medium, may be protected only against virtually identical copying.'"

The Microsoft license came back to haunt Apple when a judge dismissed most of Apple's complaints this week in 1985.

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