Business Law: Principles for Today's Commercial Environment 3rd Edition by Marianne Moody Jennings, David Twomey, Marianne Jennings

Exercise 7

The menu commands on the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet program enable users to perform accounting functions by using such commands as "Copy," "Print," and "Quit." Borland International, Inc., released its Quattro spreadsheet, a program superior to Lotus 1-2-3 that did, however, use an identical copy of the entire Lotus 1-2-3 menu tree but did not copy any of Lotus's computer code. Lotus believed that its copyright in Lotus 1-2-3 had been violated. Borland insisted that the Lotus menu command was not copyrightable because it is a method of operation foreclosed from protection under Section 102(b) of the Copyright Act of 1976. Decide. [Lotus Development Corp. v Borland International, Inc., 49 F3d 807 (1st Cir), aff'd, 516 US 233]