Late-breaking Legalities!

Judge Walker of the US District Court of Northern California upheld his earlier ruling in favor of Microsoft in the long-standing suit with Apple over various visual displays in Windows. Judge Walker ruled that all the visual displays in question fell into one of three categories, licensed, unprotectible, or simply different. Interestingly, last week Lotus won its look and feel suit against Borland for Borland’s use of the 1-2-3 menu structure in Quattro Pro. It’s a strange and slimy land out there, and perhaps we’ll look at this in more depth in a future article.