Paperback Software

~ the last words ~

Adam Osborne had already built and lost one company before this one. The Osborne 1 was the first commercially successful portable computer and Osborne Computer Corporation went into bankruptcy in 1983, which is the year he started Paperback Software International in Berkeley. The name was the thesis: software should be sold the way paperbacks are, cheaply and in volume, rather than the way hardcover business software was priced at the time.

The catalog followed that logic. VP-Planner was the spreadsheet and VP-Info the database, and there was a word processor called Paperback Writer with a spelling checker attached. VP-Expert, an expert-system shell, ended up the most durable of them and outlived the company by being sold on.

VP-Planner was the problem. It was written to work like Lotus 1-2-3 Release 1A keystroke for keystroke, so that anyone who had learned 1-2-3 could sit down at it and lose nothing, and it undercut Lotus badly on price. Other clones existed in the same window, including The Twin from Mosaic Software. Lotus went after Paperback in February 1987.

The trial ran in February 1990 and Judge Robert Keeton of the District of Massachusetts handed down his decision on 28 June. He held that the 1-2-3 menu command structure, including the choice of the command words and the order they sat in, was protected expression under Lotus's copyright, and that VP-Planner infringed it even though not a line of source code had been copied. Paperback paid $500,000, pulled VP-Planner, and agreed not to appeal. Revenue had dropped by about eighty percent by 1989 and no venture money was available to a company in that position. It liquidated, and in June 1991 VP-Expert passed to WordTech Systems.

~ the record ~

~ cheap was the whole idea ~

Osborne's argument was that business software was priced for corporate purchasing departments rather than for people, and that a spreadsheet at a fraction of the going rate would find a market underneath Lotus. He was right about the market. The mistake was that the cheapest way to make a spreadsheet people already knew how to use is to make it behave exactly like the one they already knew.

I work as an engineer and this case is upstream of arguments I have watched happen my whole career. Every time someone reimplements an interface so that existing users and existing code keep working, the question Keeton answered in 1990 comes back around in a new costume. Oracle and Google spent a decade on it over Java method signatures, and the Supreme Court did not close that one out until April 2021.

~ what keeton held ~

The useful thing about the Paperback decision is how narrow the reasoning tried to be and how wide the result was. Keeton accepted that a spreadsheet's basic functions were not protectable, and then found that the particular menu words Lotus chose and the particular order it put them in were expressive choices among many workable alternatives. That is a defensible sentence in isolation. Applied to an interface that hundreds of thousands of people had memorized, it meant the memorization itself was fenced off.

For about five years after June 1990, American software companies had to assume that copying a user interface was actionable even with clean-room code. Lotus filed against Borland on the same theory within weeks of winning this one.

~ borland got it reversed ~

Lotus ran the same argument against Borland over Quattro Pro, which offered a 1-2-3 compatible menu mode for exactly the reasons VP-Planner had. Borland had the money to fight and the case went up. In 1995 the First Circuit held that the 1-2-3 menu command hierarchy was an uncopyrightable method of operation, and in 1996 the Supreme Court split four to four, which left the reversal standing without setting a national rule.

Paperback Software had been gone for four years by then. Adam Osborne had by that point left the industry entirely, and he died in 2003 in southern India. He is remembered for the luggable computer that came before all this, which is fair enough, and almost nobody remembers that the man also lost the case that decided whether a menu could be owned.

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