The same high-powered lawyers from Microsoft Corp. who once threatened makers of Venetian blinds about using the word windows in their ads were talking out of the other side of their mouths last week in a Chicago courtroom. They argued that when Microsoft called its Web browser Internet Explorer they were not violating the copyright of a defunct Downers Grove company named SyNet that had copyrighted that very name.
Internet Explorer is like raisin bran, a generic term rather than a copyrightable name, argued Microsoft’s lawyers.
Gosh, maybe Bill’s binary barristers won’t be quite so uptight now if the rest of us say we’ve got windows in our houses.
STEVE CASE
The buzz inside the Washington beltway, most particularly at America Online headquarters in Dulles, Va., is that AOL’s commander in chief is livid over a somewhat nasty new book titled “aol.com: How Steve Case Beat Bill Gates, Nailed the Net Heads and Made Millions in the War for the Web,” by the Wall Street Journal’s Kara Swisher, based on her reporting while at the Washington Post.
The nasty part deals with Case’s relationship with his top press aide, Jean Villanueva, a romance that got hot enough that the two extremely well-heeled (and married to others) lovebirds had to tell all at a board of directors meeting, says Swisher.
DIVERSIONARY TACTIC
ADVERTISING ZINGER
Mark Platshon, chief executive of an outfit called Zing Network Inc., is floating a scheme to exploit all the time being wasted waiting for Internet pages to load–he estimates this at nearly a billion hours in 1998.
Zing (at zing.com) lets you store some pretty nifty animated film clips, tunes and other diversions to take your mind off the World Wide Wait. While you wait for a sluggish page to load, Zing plays content from the likes of Rolling Stone Music Network, Billboard, Surfer Magazine and Car & Driver.
There is, however, a real Zinger. A whopping 10 percent of the diversionary content you get is paid advertising. And what are you supposed to do while waiting for all that stuff to download?
BOZO’S CYBERIAN CIRCUS
WGN OR WEBTV?
Tribune Co., owner of this newspaper, started broadcasting Internet pages along with the rest of the stuff broadcast by WGN-Ch. 9, last week, offering such over-the-air bells and whistles as sports scores, recipes, the full text of news stories and even a limited form of e-mail.
This computer-readable content is included in the WGN broadcast signal and gets displayed on the video screen much like stuff gets displayed on a regular Web page. The catch is that you need a personal computer running Windows 98’s WebTV module and outfitted with a video tuner card to make it work.
