MCA licensing (was: Public mainframe system)

Fred Cisin wrote: Thanks for the information. I would imagine that there were variations on what patents they obtained for different countries. The computer companies who asked me for a technical review were from Brazil. If you think reading patents in English is a pain, you can't imagine the horror that a translation to Portuguese by non technical people can be. They didn't use a single computer industry term in the whole text but made up their own vocabulary out of thin air. If the PC patents were anything like the seven I saw, finding prior art must have been trivial (though fruitless, in the case of my clients), since winning against IBM would have been more costly than caving in). The sued the three PC makers in Brazil in early 1984 (Softec, Scopus and Microtec). They dropped their suit after all three made rather trivial modifications to their BIOSes, however. Just switching around some pieces of code while keeping key entry points intact was enough to make them happy. None of that "clean room" stuff was needed. Interestingly enough, Scopus and Microtec were really afraid of Microsoft. So they didn't include the Basic ROMs, which some software needed in order to run. Instead, they would unofficially tell their clients to find a friend with a Softec machine and run this little program to dump the ROMs to floppy and then find another friend with an EPROM burner. They were pretty shocked when it was IBM that went after them instead. They had assumed that since IBM had published the commented source for the BIOS in their technical manual they weren't interested in protecting it. And note that software only became protected by copyright in Brazil in October of 1987, so IBM's threat was a pretty empty one. -- Jecel