BY PAMELA SAMUELSON
HACKING INTELLECTUAL
PROPERTY LAW
Considering how intellectual property law has evolved in response to advances in
computing technologies.
2008 marks not only this magazine’s 50th anniversary, but also
my 20th year as a contributor to
CACM. I was initially drawn
into the ACM community to
decrypt the legal theories underlying the then highly controversial software copyright “look and
feel” lawsuits, which were creative, if ultimately unsuccessful,
attempts to hack intellectual
property law to limit competitive imitations. Apple Computer
brought one such suit against
Microsoft Corp., and Lotus
Development Corp. another
against Paperback Software.
Back then, things didn’t look so
good for Microsoft or Paperback because a widely cited
appellate court decision from
1986, Whelan Associates v. Jaslow Dental Labs, had
opined that computer programs should enjoy a
broad scope of copyright protection, including for
program structure, sequence, and organization
(“SSO”) and for the look and feel of their user interfaces and seemingly for program behavior.
Things looked even worse for Microsoft in 1990
after Paperback lost at the trial court level and ran out
