Xerox Corp warned back in May that it intended to protect its copyrights in the user interface it developed for the original mouse-and-icon computer, the Xerox Star, when it announced that Metaphor Computer Systems Inc had signed to license its screen displays (CI No 1,184) – but observers were still stunned when late on Thursday night it slapped in a lawsuit against Apple Computer Inc demanding $100m in royalties paid by others to Apple that it claims rightly belong to Xerox, and $50m in damage to its business by the continued marketing of systems infringing its copyrights. The suit covers the user interfaces of the Lisa and all Macintosh computers, and throws into confusion the suit still going through the courts that Apple brought against Hewlett-Packard Co and Microsoft Corp over the same issue, directed specifically at Hewlett’s NewWave and Microsoft’s Presentation Manager. It is widely questioned whether the Xerox suit will be successful, coming as it does six years after the Lisa was introduced in 1983, and it could also stand or fall on whether there was a C in a circle on the screen displays of the Star computer. If it is successful, few developers of systems with iconic user interfaces would be immune from demands for royalties from Xerox – but while the Open Software Foundation’s Motif would be exposed, the rival Open Look from Unix International Inc would be home free because Sun Microsystems, which designed it, has signed a technology sharing agreement with Xerox. Apple contends that the suit is without merit because only expressions of ideas can be copyrighted, not ideas themselves, and its icons are not the same as those on the Xerox Star – but that assertion seems to compromise its lawsuit against Hewlett and Microsoft.
