The US federal court has turned the temporary restraining order restricting RDI Computer Corp, San Diego, California, from selling, advertising or even demonstrating the Mac part of its Sparc laptop Brite Lite, into a more serious preliminary injunction. The ruling was made by Judge Vaughn Walker, who is also hearing the Apple Computer Inc vs Microsoft Corp and Hewlett-Packard Co case, and was based on his finding that the plaintiff, Xcelerated Systems, will likely succeed in winning the copyright infringement and trade secrets suit it’s brought against RDI. Xcelerated claims to own the software that made Brite Lite Macintosh-compatible and has charged RDI with marketing it without a licence after negotiations between them broke down. RDI allegedly altered the program by removing Xcelerated’s copyright notice and disabled its security access code mechanism to make unauthorised copying possible. RDI offered its Mac technology, which it called Companion, to any Sparc vendor for resale. Under the restraining order, RDI has to turn over all copies of the program to Xcelerated. Xcelerated president David McMillen said these apparently totalled 82 copies according to records his lawyer has acquired. Xcelerated’s product, which it calls Liken, is still unfinished. RDI had to buy Apple machines and scavenge their BIOS read-only memories to use in Brite Lite for it to work. Xcelerated hopes to have a software-only system ready by the end of the year and wants to move to other environments besides Sparc. McMillen said interest in his technology has heightened in the wake of the IBM Corp-Apple Computer alliance and he has had inquiries from some of the companies in the ACE camp.
