Suing Circles - A Lawyers' Picnic
Sydney Morning Herald
Sunday June 14, 1992
RICHARD BURTON, the author and orientalist (not the Welsh actor) wrote: "Our wrangling lawyers are so litigious and busy here on earth, that I think they will plead their clients' causes hereafter, some of them in hell."
Most would consider Burton over-charitable in his estimation of their final destination. Here is the current state of play in the morass which is the law as applied to computers:
* Sega in Japan will pay $US43 million to inventor Jan R. Coyle for using his technology of employing low-frequency sound signals to control a video screen in Sega's video game machines. Note that last April a jury decided that $US33 million was the appropriate amount but Sega's lawyers appealed. Sega vice president Tokuzo Komai said: "We should have compromised earlier." Quite so.
* Quorum Software Systems in California is suing Apple for what it calls"unsupported allegations of patent and copyright infringement".
This you may, like me, consider odd. The complaint comes because Quorum does not like letters written by Roger Heinen, Apple's vice-president of Macintosh software architecture, which accuse Quorum of infringing its intellectual property rights.
Apple has also revoked Quorum's privileges as an Apple Partner.
Quorum says it is taking legal action now because it believes it was inevitable that Apple would follow its most recent actions with additional formal legal action. On past record this seems a reasonable assumption.
* IBM is back suing Comdisco, accusing it of illegally possessing and using IBM's products.
IBM claims that 17 of its powerful 3090 computer systems were wrongly used in Comdisco transactions with companies including Sears, Deere, McDonnell Douglas and Electronic Data Systems. A complete system costs up to $US100 million.
The two companies negotiated a settlement before the previous matter was brought to court on the basis that Comdisco would not tell customers that modified memory cards are backed by IBM, even if the hardware bears the IBM logo.
* Borland has applied for the dismissal of two copyright infringement lawsuits that were filed by Ashton-Tate before Borland took over the company.
The suits were against Fox Software (now owned by Microsoft) and the Santa Cruz Operation.
Borland said that it had already agreed in a consent decree with the US Government earlier this year not to initiate any claim for copyright infringement in the command language and menu terms used in Ashton-Tate's family of dBase programs.
* Chips and Technologies is suing Intel, alleging that Intel's 386SL microprocessor technology - the one used in laptops - violates one of its key chip memory patents.
Note carefully that Intel has filed patent infringement suits against three firms making clones of the 386SL.
Named in the actions besides Chips and Technologies are Advanced Micro Devices and Cyrix.
A lawyers' picnic, indeed.
* Former executives, accountants and investment bankers involved with the defunct disk-drive maker, MiniScribe Corp, have agreed to pay $US128.1 million to settle fraud charges.
In addition to MiniScribe management, defendants include the accounting firm, Coopers and Lybrand, and the investment banking concern firm, Hambrecht and Quist, among others.
The suit charged that former executives counted more than 6,000 contaminated disk drives as inventory and also packaged bricks as computer products and shipped them to distributors, recording sales of $4.3 million.
© 1992 Sydney Morning Herald