Explanation of Court Rulings

Explanation of Court Rulings

Account for the court ruling in the four cases discussed above on ethical grounds. That is, explain from an ethics standpoint the court ruling in each case.


Whelan vs. Jaslow

Whelan did not commit software piracy or plagiarism since no verbatim copies were made. It may be true that the case was resolved using an old appreciation of computer science. Actually, this is a trend in the open source scene were most open source projects are inspired by commercial applications. The commercial and open source projects have the same functionality but no piracy or plagiarism need to be done to accomplish it.


Computer Associates vs. Altai

Altai did an almost noble thing of doing a second version of their program since they do not want to be unethical, in a sense. Altai could have capitalized on a key asset that they have, the ex-Computer Associates employee, but they did not. Computer Associates’ move of suing Altai could be somehow viewed as malicious. Too bad for CA, the case of Whelan vs. Jaslow was viewed as outdated so the case was not in their favor.


Apple vs. Microsoft and HP

The case could be analogous to having masterpieces and their replicas. Look and feels were just matters of style, and styles by nature are prone to mimicking. But still no software was pirated and no written work was plagiarized. Today actually, Apple’s look and feels for their applications were being mimicked by various projects but there are no issues with it.


Lotus vs. Paperback Software, Mosaic Software, and Borland

In here, the basic premise of software piracy or plagiarism was not committed. Of course, if several proponents are creating the same functions for their software, it is not uncommon for their different applications to have similar menu structures. I think I can smell unethical motives not in the issue of the menu structures but in the courts that decided for Mosaic and Paperback. It could be noticed that the previous two companies were not as big as Lotus or Borland. It could not be helped but have a hint that there was partiality in the rulings where smaller companies lost but a big company did not, on cases having the same nature. Today there exists the Microsoft Office suite and the OpenOffice.org suite. OpenOffice.org actually has a menu structure that is very similar to the Microsoft Office menu structure. But no software piracy or plagiarism was committed.