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From: kadie@herodotus.cs.uiuc.edu (Carl M. Kadie)
Newsgroups: news.misc,news.sysadmin,comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: Official Legal Announcement regarding Apple's Source Code
Message-ID: <1309@garcon.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 19 Jun 89 22:11:55 GMT
References: <2073@astroatc.UUCP> <2928@csd4.milw.wisc.edu> <841@hydra.gatech.EDU> <394@v7fs1.UUCP> <736@rwing.UUCP> <1989Jun19.175611.1956@utzoo.uucp>
Reply-To: kadie@herodotus.cs.uiuc.edu.UUCP (Carl M. Kadie)
Organization: University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Lines: 24

In article <1989Jun19.175611.1956@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
...
>One should remember that Apple may have felt constrained in what they could
>say.  As I understand it, the courts have quite consistently held that if
>you want your copyright or trademark to be preserved, you have to make an
>effort to enforce it when infringements occur.  That means snarling and
>threatening, not just saying "hey, that's not nice".
...

Apple's problems are more subtle than this. Their copyrights
and trademarks are as safe as they have every been. I think 
what they are worried about are *trade secrets*.  My understanding
is that one reason Macs are (were) so hard to clone is that no one but
Apple knows (knew) the full specification of the Mac ROM. Last month
this specification was a trade secret. Today?






Carl Kadie
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
ARPA:  kadie@m.cs.uiuc.edu