Lego and the IP Conundrum

Packetknife writes: "Business 2.0 has an article on Lego and the development and business issues surrounding the Mindstorms product line. The article concentrates on intellectual property issues and the role of hackers in the development of Mindstorms. The hook to the OSS movement is obvious in the article." Interesting piece about Lego trying not to bite the hand that feeds it, even though the temptation is strong.

Comments

Not patents but copyrights

[yerricde]

Apple sued companies (particularly Franklin Computer Corp.) that violated it's patents. IBM *encouraged* people to hack and clone their BIOS.

No, the lawsuits were not about patents but about copyrights. The Apple II ROM didn't have a syscall interface like PC BIOS did; A2 syscalls were merely jsr instructions to the entry point in ROM of the function. Because this restricted the possible length of each function's binary code, it was almost impossible to make a 100% Apple compatible ROM without making it byte-identical to Apple's.

But the real reason Apple sued is because their contract with Microsoft required them to do so. Microsoft owned the copyright on the Basic interpreter in Apple II Plus and later computers.

Guess which type of computer became the most successful?

The one with the more extensible API. IBM designed its BIOS syscalls around a realization that it would eventually have to change the internal structure of its BIOS in later revisions to the PC (e.g. XT and AT).

However, the LEGO case isn't about patents or copyrights; it's about trademarks, as the name "LegOS" gives a false appearance of a LEGO product. LEGO doesn't want to tech-support third-party software that could potentially damage expensive sensors and motors.