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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] san rr com> wrote:
>> Warp wrote:
>>> Why would it be illegal? There's no law in any country I know of which
>>> would forbid building a system which is capable of running an program.
>
>> It would probably be the "look and feel" lawsuits, even ignoring the patent
>> problems.
>
> I have hard time believing that trade dress laws apply to basic computer
> user interfaces.
It's copyright law here. Basically, the original lawsuit was over greeting
cards. One company hired people to think up and design greeting cards. At
another company, the CEO would go into stores and buy up competitor cards he
liked, then give them to his workers who would draw new pictures but give
the same basic "look and feel" to the cards. One example was a card with a
cute little girl in a sun dress and bonnet, and inside it said "I wuv you."
The competitor drew it with a pink background instead of blue, put a
teddy-bear instead of a girl, and put the same text inside. So the artwork
was all original, and the text wasn't copyrightable, but the overall
look-and-feel was (for better or worse) judged to be subject to copyright.
It's nothing to do with "trade dress", which is more like trademarks than
copyright. Microsoft wasn't making any products that could be confused with
Apple's products, which is what trademark is about.
> (not to talk that Apple could probably sue
> Microsoft for the same thing,
Indeed, Apple is the one that started applying "look-and-feel" to Microsoft
in a lawsuit over the UI.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corporation
Unfortunately, the "look-and-feel" argument has been applied so much to
software that I can't easily track down the original lawsuit over greeting
cards that set off the whole "look-and-feel is subject to copyright even if
all the actual text and artwork is new" stuff. Altho I did find one
reference that greeting cards are the *second* most litigated look-and-feel
suit. :-)
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
Eiffel - The language that lets you specify exactly
that the code does what you think it does, even if
it doesn't do what you wanted.
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