Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!apple.com!wrs
From: wrs@apple.com (Walter Smith)
Newsgroups: gnu.gcc
Subject: Re: Apple Employees Please Note
Message-ID: <2376@internal.Apple.COM>
Date: 15 Jun 89 06:16:09 GMT
References: <8906080252.AA02091@wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu>
Sender: usenet@Apple.COM
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In article <8906080252.AA02091@wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu> tower@AI.MIT.EDU 
(Leonard H. Tower Jr.) writes:
> Circulate an internal petition protesting the suit.  Only Apple
> Employees can sign.  Arrange a meeting with your company's executive
> committee.  Present it to them.  Tell them how many of the employees
> are unhappy.  Tell them why Apple should drop the suit.  Tell them to
> drop the suit.

Avoiding any comments on The Lawsuit itself, to keep Apple's many lawyers 
off my back, I would nevertheless like to make a meta-comment.

I question the basic premise of the above exhortation.  Look and feel 
copyright is an unclear legal concept.  If The Lawsuit is dropped, it will 
remain an unclear legal concept until someone else brings a suit over 
it (and, presumably, suffers the loss of GNU support, should they be 
unlucky enough to be a hardware manufacturer).  Delaying the process of 
clarification in this way does not seem realistic or productive to me.  
In particular, dropping the suit would do nothing to reduce the threat of 
hypothetical anti-FSF lawsuits.

What matters is what people believe the result of the suit should be (as 
RMS, I think, has already mentioned), not whether people believe there 
should be a suit at all.  The rhetoric of the FSF/LPF and their opponents 
cannot and will not take the place of legal precedent.  The FSF's efforts 
should be devoted (and are, I hope, mostly *being* devoted) to altering the 
outcome of any and all look-and-feel suits; those efforts will be wasted if 
the suits are dropped.

- Walt

[
A personal indulgence follows.  Please read carefully before flaming.

    Opinion: Anyone who thinks a good user interface is less the intellectual 
property of its designer than a system's source code is the intellectual 
property of its author must surely never have designed a particularly good  
user interface.  If the FSF would like to design a GNU user interface and 
copyleft it, that's perfectly valid, and if they influence the Congress to 
amend the copyright law to limit the protection of intellectual property, 
that's valid too, but claiming that a user interface design is not 
intellectual property seems silly.

*** I am not implying the validity or invalidity of any particular claim of
*** copyright infringement.
]

--
Walter Smith                            wrs@apple.com, apple!wrs
Apple Computer, Inc.                    (408) 996-1010
My corporation disavows any knowledge of my activities on the network.