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God sues over look and feel
Oh, holy copyright! God's suing!
By Douglas Barney
From April 25th 1988 issue of Computerworld
In a move unanticipated by computer analysts, God himself has filed suit
against nearly the entire software industry for violation of a long-standing
audiovisual copyright.
The suit, filed last week in East Heaven District Court, alleges that
all computer firms, including Apple Computer, Inc., Lotus Development Corp.
and Paperback Software International, have illegally copied God's
original look and feel.
God, however, declined to file suit against Microsoft Corp. and it's
well-compensated founder Bill "Pearly" Gates. "I can't very well sue my
business partner, now can I?" God said in an exclusive interview with
Oral Roberts last week.
Contrary to popular belief, pull-down menus, windowing and icons did
not originate at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center but at St. Peter's
Research Center. "Heck, I used a graphical user interface when laying
out the continents and ran the program on my heavenly host," God said.
As the ultimate creator, God also claimed ownership of all software
innovations. According to the perfect logic behind the suit, God created
man in his own image. Man in turn created software based on God's intellectual
property. Therefore, God created software, the suit claimed.
"All software was created either by me or in my own image -- that is
except for Topview, which was Lucifer's doing. Now these upstart firms
are selling my creations and making millions," God said. Lucifer could
not be reached for comment, but sources close to the fallen angel described
his reaction as "heated." When asked who would hear the case, God replied,
"I'll be the judge of that."
In fact, because of one of God's copyrights, Microsoft's popular word
processing package, originally called God's Word, was renamed Microsoft
Word.
"Bill and I teamed up on that one, but I was left out of developing
Windows," God claimed. "Maybe that's why it was so late."
God was surprisingly blunt when asked about the recent lawsuit by
Apple alleging copyright violation against Microsoft. "I knew a firm
named Apple was bound to be bad," he said.
Apple President John Sculley shugged off the suit. "I wrote the Book
of John, called Odyssey. And I created a miracle by giving the Macintosh
expansion slots, something Job, I mean Jobs, refused to do."
The suit seeks an unspecified number of pennies from heaven and an
immediate injunction preventing all software vendors from distributing
products. It also asks that computer journalists stop taking God's name
in vain, goshdarnit!
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