Replying to a message of Geo. to Robert Comer:

 G> From: "Geo." 

 G> How can they do that? First they created a temporary (and I use that
 G> word loosely) monopoly via copyright and patent then they created a
 G> law to maintain that monopoly indefinitely and now you want them to
 G> say if you use that law then it's an antitrust issue?

It seems to me that *if* the clone's computer chip is not absolutely
identical to Lexmark's chip then Lexmark doesn't have a case.  This
principle was pretty well identified when Apple Computer ran Franklin
Computer out of business; Franklin had been making clones of Apple's
machines, but the ROM chips inside the machines were *exact* bit-for-bit
copies of the Apple ROMs (including Apple's copyright notice and a couple
of the authors' names embedded therein) - that's an obvious copyright
violation.

If one makes a chip that is functionally equivalent it isn't illegal -
Award and Phoenix both make BIOS chips for Intel PC's, the sets are
functionally equivalent but not identical.

---