Building on earlier rulings, courts affirmed through cases resolved around this period that object code embedded in ROM chips deserved the same copyright protection as printed source code, dealing a decisive blow to companies producing unauthorized Apple II clones. The ruling helped cement software's legal status as intellectual property deserving robust protection, shaping the trajectory of the entire personal computer industry.
In the early 1980s, Franklin Computer Corporation had built a business selling the Franklin Ace, a machine that ran Apple II software because it simply copied Apple's operating system wholesale, reasoning that operating systems, being purely functional, might fall outside the scope of copyright protection meant for creative works.
Apple sued, and the resulting litigation became one of the foundational battles establishing that computer code, even code embedded permanently in silicon chips that most users would never see, deserved full copyright protection. The legal principles hammered out in the Apple v. Franklin line of cases gave software companies confidence to invest heavily in proprietary operating systems, knowing courts would treat wholesale copying as theft rather than fair competition, a foundation the entire software licensing industry would come to depend upon.