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

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First?

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.
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