Talk:Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp.

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First?

Latest comment: 16 years ago1 comment1 person in discussion

I'm going to fact-tag the statement in the article that this was "the first successful attempt in a court of law in the United States to prove that computer software in electronic form (not visual) could be protected by copyright". I'm fact-tagging rather than correcting because I am confused about some dates.

From the text of the ruling: In the one other reported case to have considered [something], Apple Computer, Inc. v. Formula International, Inc., 562 F. Supp. 775, 218 USPQ 47 (C.D. Cal. 1983), the court reached the same conclusion which we do, i.e. that an operating system program is not per se precluded from copyright.

It looks like the district court in Formula granted the preliminary injunction that Apple requested, "based on its copyright and trademark infringement claims", inter alia. [1] Section 13 of the latter ruling also alludes to "existing case law concerning the copyrightability of computer programs".

It would be surprising to me to see that this hadn't been established earlier in the mainframe world. So, hence the fact tag. Tempshill (talk) 18:07, 20 June 2008 (UTC)Reply

mainframes were sold as turnkey systems, with the software custom-written to the buyers requirements, so there wasn't really any need to copy software. before this case software was regarded similarly to a recipe, as a list of instructions for the machine to perform and hence wasn't copyrightable.

Removal of more footnotes|date=August 2008 because its Case Law and legal opinion

I removed

Because it is a legal case and decision is fully documented as a matter of United States Law. Fortunately, the text is available at Google Scholar and other sources for free, it does not require a paid subscription to Computer-assisted legal research(CALR) like Westlaw, LexisNexis, JustCite, HeinOnline, Bloomberg Law, VLex and LexEur. The full text of decision is available on Google Scholar here: https://scholar.google.com/scholar_case. I also changed external link descriptions to "decision" instead of "opinion", although in hindsight I could have clarified with legal opinion, as the modifier "legal" would have accomplished the same with the same meaning. Really NO article on legal decisions needs more footnotes as they are their own reference, as is the case in many abusive "footnote needed" and "citation needed" tags on Wikipedia articles at present. It's often nonsensical to add such tags. All too often it's too easy for "editors" to tag articles this way, without follow up work to either find cites or delete the sentence or article in question, which is indeed the included warning with such tags. If you are both unable to find citations yourself OR delete the contribution after a reasonable period of time, please don't use these tags. With great power comes great responsibility! I wish there was a way to punish these editors for polluting articles with useless tags, many of which have gone unheeded for decades. It is a big problem with Wikipedia and as of July 2021 there are 431,986 articles with "Citation needed" statements!^[1]^[2]^[3] Yes, I did just over-cite my statement about "needing citation". I hope this drives home the point!

References

How previous section applies to other articles

I might add that for similar reasons, I let the refimprove template on Vtech's Laser 128 stand, there was no legal decision, their "cleanroom technique" was thought to have sufficient legal protection by Apple, as IBM did of the Compaq Portable and Control Data Products' MPC 1600 "Multi Personal Computer". IBM threatened legal action against Corona Data System and Eagle Computers then settled, apparently deciding against the risks and expense of challenging the copyright status of their PC's BIOS in court.

Add topic

[1] ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_needed

[2] ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citation_needed

[3] ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources#When_and_why_to_cite_sources

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