Scientists Challenge Companies' Lock on Software Programs By ALAN COOPERMAN AP Business Writer CAMBRIDGE, Mass. (AP) - Some of the nation's top computer scientists are challenging big companies they claim are trying to gain control over parts of computer programs as fundamental as steering wheels and pedals on cars. A handful of computer firms have filed lawsuits asserting they are entitled to copyrights over the ``look and feel'' of popular computer programs, including widely used commands, menus and displays. ``If there were copyrights like this on cars, then every manufacturer would have to give you a different way to steer,'' said Richard Stallman, a 36-year-old programmer at the Massaachusetts Institute of Technology. ``If you learned to drive a Ford, you wouldn't know how to drive Chevrolets. Some cars would have throttles, others would have joysticks, and each manufacturer would have to find a new way of doing it,'' he said. Shouting slogans such as ``Hey hey, ho ho, software tyranny has got to go,'' about 150 MIT professors and students picketed Wednesday outside the computer firm Lotus Development Corp. The protesters, including programmers from Boston-area companies and some top computer scientists, say the firms are trying to gain permanent control over computers' most fundamental conventions. They've mounted a grass-roots campaign against companies suing over programming. The rash of lawsuits includes complaints filed by Apple Computer Inc. against competitors Microsoft and Hewlett Packard Co., and by Ashton Tate against Fox Software. Lotus, which makes the best-selling computer accounting program Lotus 1-2-3, is suing competitors Paperback Software International and Mosaic Marketing Inc. Lotus and some other software companies contend that unless their products enjoy strong copyright protection, they will not have an economic incentive to develop new programs. ``Our argument is that out-and-out copying of other people's work stifles creativity and innovation,'' said Lotus spokeswoman Betsy Kosheff. ``Copyright law allows you to take other people's work and build on it, but not to steal it.'' Copyright lawyers said the rash of ``look and feel'' lawsuits began in late 1986, after a federal judge in California ruled that a small software company, Unison World Inc., had infringed a competitor's copyright on a program for making customized greeting cards. Since then, several companies have won similar cases, but ``each case, rather than settling the law, has tended to unsettle it and raise more questions,'' said Thomas M.S. Hemnes, a partner in the Boston law firm of Foley, Hoag & Eliot. The MIT protest grew out of an advertisement placed in an MIT student newspaper last month by Stallman; Gerald J. Sussman, a professor of electrical engineering; and Marvin Minsky, founder of MIT's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. They warned that the lawsuits could freeze out new companies, make computers harder to use and, ultimately, retard the industry. ``Until quite recently, people invented things, everybody gave each other all their software, we had fun and people made money anyway,'' Sussman said Wednesday. ``I'd like to see that come back.'' Stallman, a prominent programmer who developed EMACS, a widely used system for editing computer programs, said it is in the public interest to have computer programs share basic attributes, so users do not have to learn each program from scratch. The lawsuits, he charged, will lead to ``inefficiency and gratuitous incompatibility,'' with ``a heavy cost for the economy.'' Protesters said they have formed a new organization, the League for Programming Freedom, to try to pressure Lotus and other firms to drop the lawsuits. In leaflets handed out at the pickets, the group urged people to boycott the firms bringing the lawsuits and to buy competing products instead. They also advised programmers not to go to work for Lotus, Apple and Ashton Tate. AP-NR-05-25-89 0117EST