I'm no Lawyer, but I do think that the "man in the street" has it over the lawyer in one respect. He or she has not had to study law and therefore some things are still "Common Sense" to him or her. What I hope to do in this "article" is demonstrate how fancy lawyers now claim to own the rights to some things that they patently (sic) do not own the rights to.
Firstly, The Open Group, a San Francisco company that claims ownership of the Unix trademark, is suing Apple Computer. They have a beef with Apple for using the term Unix in conjunction with its Mac OS X operating system and want to license it to them.
Some say that is was Apple who started the trend when they tried unsuccessfully to sue Microsoft for stealing the "Look and Feel" of the Macintosh Operating System. Apple had in fact been invited to the Palo Alto Research Center to see what Xerox had come up with after Xerox had paid several scientists to sit around to research new way of doing things. Xerox invited the boys from Apple over to "have a look" in return for some cheap stock options. Apple scooped up the ideas they saw on that day and ran with them, first utilizing them in a computer called Lisa, then later on in the Macintosh.
