What Marx can tell us about Bill Gates
John Naughton
Sunday January 5, 2003
The Observer
In 1946 the Marx Brothers decided to make an independent feature film
entitled A Night in Casablanca.
It seems that Chico, who had a serious gambling
habit, was hard up. The production was initially conceived as a spoof of
the Warner Brothers' 1942 classic, Casablanca (it even had a character
called Humphrey Bogus), but in production the script broadened its focus
and became a general parody of wartime melodramas.
IMHO (as they abbreviate 'in my humble opinion' on the net), the spoof is
immeasurably superior to the original. Groucho plays the manager of the
Hotel Casablanca, whose predecessors have been murdered by an escaped Nazi
war criminal played by Sig Ruman. Chico and Harpo team up to protect
Groucho, who runs the hotel in his own distinctive style.
Groucho & Co received letters threatening legal action from Warner
Brothers, who regarded the title as infringing their rights to Casablanca.
Groucho responded with hilarious letters to Warners' lawyers.
'I just don't understand your attitude,' he wrote. 'Even if you plan on
re-releasing your picture, I am sure that the average movie fan could learn
in time to distinguish between Ingrid Bergman and Harpo. I don't know
whether I could, but I certainly would like to try.'
He went on: 'You claim you own Casablanca and that no-one else can use that
name without your permission. What about "Warner Brothers"? Do you own
that, too? You probably have the right to use the name Warner, but what
about Brothers?
'Professionally, we were brothers long before you were. We were touring the
sticks as the Marx Brothers when Vitaphone was still a gleam in the
inventor's eye, and even before us there had been other brothers - the
Smith Brothers; The Brothers Karamazov; Dan Brothers, an outfielder with
Detroit; and Brother, Can You Spare a Dime? (This was originally Brothers,
Can You Spare a Dime? but this was spreading a dime pretty thin, so they
threw out one brother, gave all the money to the other one and whittled it
down to Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?)'.
There was a lot more (for the full text see The Oxford Book of Letters,
edited by Frank and Anita Kermode) and no more was heard about the
threatened proceedings.
Why am I telling you all this? Because over in Seattle a Very Large Company
is claiming that it owns the word 'Windows'.
Last December Microsoft filed a complaint against Lindows.com, a start-up
distributing a version of the (free) Linux operating system. Microsoft
accused Lindows founder Michael Robertson of trademark infringement,
trademark dilution and unfair competition - all of this only five months
after Lindows.com was founded and before it had a product on the market.
The Microsoft case may make sense to a trademark lawyer, but it is
preposterous in both computer-science and common-sense terms. As far as
computing is concerned, Microsoft was a late comer on the windows
technology scene - in the sense of resizable rectangular frames displayed
on a bit mapped screen.
Douglas Engelbart had a windows system in the mid-Sixties at his Stanford
Research Institute lab, and Xerox Parc had computers running 'windows' in
1972.
By 1984 Apple was marketing a windows-based interface in the shape of the
Macintosh and the trade press was speculating that eventually Microsoft
would get around to 'doing windows' - which it did in 1985 in the shape of
Windows 1.0, a turkey disguised as a computer program (the first usable
Microsoft windowing program, Windows 3.0, was not released until 1990).
In common-sense terms, the Microsoft claim is even dafter.
What about Uncle Joe, who traded as a window-cleaner in the 1950s with the
innovative slogan 'We Do Windows!? Or those 1940s newsreels entitled
'Windows on the World'? And so on.
From past experience, we can be sure that Bill Gates & Co will not be
deterred by ridicule.
For what's really bugging them is the temerity of a start-up company aiming
to take some of their business. Lindows, you see, is a consumer-friendly
version of Linux. It functions much like Microsoft Windows and - more
importantly - is being sold pre-installed on dirt-cheap PCs marketed by
Wal-Mart in the US (and by Evesham in the UK).
Up to now, Microsoft has been unable to do anything about the Linux
movement - because it's headless and distributed free. But Lindows provides
a tangible target, which is why it's been selected for extermination. Where
are you, Groucho, when we need you?
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.observer.co.uk/business/story/0,6903,868645,00.html
