Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> 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.

Post a reply to this message