no, you could very easily clone the Apple II easily and it was done many, many times

it's true that eventually Apple started suing people, but until Apple vs Franklin it was unclear if you could even copyright a BIOS. And once that was determined, people had to clean-room reverse engineer the BIOS but it was possible to make clones (see the Laser 128 and many many others)

this is just as open as the IBM PC was. You couldn't just drop a copy of the PC bios into your clone, you had to go to a 3rd-party reverse-engineered BIOS