landauer%morocco@Sun.COM (Doug Landauer) (01/22/87)
In article <6640003@hpfclp.HP.COM> diamant@hpfclp.HP.COM (John Diamant) wrote, in response to Dave Neff's article: > For some reason, under certain circumstances, reverse engineering is > considered acceptable (hardware clones of machines), and possibly UNIX > clones. In other cases, it is not, such as pull down menus that Apple > managed to patent (or otherwise protect -- I don't know the details). > I don't really understand the criterion used to determine whether it is > O.K. or not. No one does. In Apple's case, it was DRI's "GEM" software that was changed because of this consideration. This dispute never went to court, so it doesn't have much bearing on whether the Mac's "look and feel" is patented or whatever. (DRI just didn't want the expense of going to court at a critical time in GEM's product lifetime and in their cash flow situation.) One court case that might have relevance was the one brought by the creators of Pacman against an imitator (but here, I don't know the details.) To make this relevant to MINIX (and Unix clones in general), my opinion is that "look and feel" is irrelevant in the case of Unix clones because the versions of Unix that are being cloned have no screen oriented utilities. "Look and Feel" is a trademark of the Mitchell Brothers, of San Francisco. -- Doug Landauer Sun's Net: landauer@morocco Phone: 415 691-7655 ARPANET (aka DDN): landauer@sun.com UUCP: {amdahl, decwrl, hplabs, seismo, ...}!sun!landauer
billw@navajo.STANFORD.EDU (William E. Westfield) (01/22/87)
According to "legal care of your software", the user interface of a program (eg the screens it uses, and so on - the "look and feel") can be copyrigthed SEPERATELY and in addition to the program code. This is frequently done for video games and the like. BillW
braun@drivax.UUCP (01/27/87)
In article <11824@sun.uucp> landauer@sun.UUCP (Doug Landauer) writes: >In Apple's case, it was DRI's "GEM" software that was changed >because of this consideration. This dispute never went to court... And the rumor mill has it that XEROX was willing to "go to bat" for DRI if it did ever go to court. It is a real shame that it didn't. This is an important issue, and has some very important legal ramifications for Windows developers. I think Apple would liked to have seen it go to court as well; not that I think they wanted to "sue DRI", but that they wanted to establish the precedence. -- kral 408/647-6112 ...!{amdahl,ihnp4}!drivax!braun "Who is Number One?" "You are, Number Six!"