It's not the tree arrangements but the specific commands that are in the
tree that Judge Keeton considers protectable. The BNA summary of
the case was sufficient to indicate one disquieting comment by
Judge Keeton. Althought he stated that the opinion was directed
to "on-the-fly" macro conversion and did not relate to a case
where the macros were converted once and then used in their converted
form (as, for example, an interprested as compared to a compiled
language), there does not seem to be much difference in the reasoning -
in either case the command structure of Lotus would have to be referenced
in order to do the translation.
If I remember correctly this flies in the face of Judge Keeton's earlier opinion in the Paperback case where he implied that programs such as Excel that translate Lotus macros rather than using the same macros would be non-infringing. Does this mean that Excel will be the next defendent?
-Riva Bickelbickel
@cs.oswego.edu
Received on Mon Sep 20 1993 - 20:12:07 GMT
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