fischer@iesd.auc.dk (Lars P. Fischer) (06/04/90)
I would like to call attention to the "Legally Speaking" column of the May issue of the CACM. In this article, Pamela Samuelson and Robert J. Glushko report on a poll they did at the ACM CHI conference in May '89 (CHI '89). Basically, they did the following: they invited two lawyers to speak on the issue of UI Copyrights. An Apple lawyer told the audience why UI Copyrights is good thing. Another lawyer told the audience why not. After this, a poll was taken. 667 people answered various questions (e.g. "Do you think UIs should be copyrightable?"). The article presents some tables with results from the poll. These are reproduced at the end of this posting. Looking at table 1 and 2, we see that the respondents were mainly designers, researchers, and engineers from industry, r&d institutions, and academia. Looking at table 3, we see that these people are, in general, in favor of copyrights on computer software (source and object code). That's a shame, but note that there is a strong opposition to copyrights on "Look & Feel" and other aspects of user interfaces. Now, if we look at table 4, we see that most of the respondents felt that UI copyrights would make it more difficult for them to carry out their work, and would severely harm the industry at large. Let's stop a moment and consider. The respondents are representatives of the people that design and create user interfaces, both practitioners and managers. We have both commercial and non-commercial interests. Now, these people don not think UI copyrights is a good idea. They don't like the idea because they believe that UI copyrights will make it harder to design good interfaces, and will slow down progress in the UI field. Well, why is it we have copyright law in the first place? Copyright law exists to stimulate progress. The reasoning is that if we do not protect investments in research and development, no one will do it, and so progress will come to a halt. Ah, but in the case of user interfaces, we *do* have progress (lots of it) *without* protection. And the people in the field feel that protection will make it *harder* to progress further. Therefore, user interface copyrights is a "bad thing". And therefore, the people in the field are opposed to the idea. The CACM article presents lots of additional material and legal argument (the authors are lawyers). In all, the article presents very strong arguments against UI interface copyrights. I would recommend it to anyone interested in the issue. The article demonstrates that the FSF is not alone with its views on the matter but in fact is largely consistent with the views of those in the user interface field. The article also argues that there are legal arguments in favor of the FSF view. So, everybody get together and tell Apple and friends to stuff it. /Lars --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Table 1: Respondent population by Job function. ----------------------------------------------- UI designer 44 % Researcher 32 % Software engineer 29 % Human Factors engineer 15 % Manager 15 % Faculty 8 % Consultants 6 % Students 6 % Table 2: Respondent population by employer. -------------------------------------------- Computer manufacturer 26 % R & D organization 23 % University 20 % Software vendor 14 % Other 14 % Table 3: Support for copyright and/or patent for software aspects.* ------------------------------------------------------------------ aspect cop. pat. both neither Source code 71% 10% 12% 7% Object code 65% 10% 11% 15% Algorithms 8% 32% 7% 53% Commands 6% 4% 2% 88% Screen Layout 25% 4% 2% 69% Screen Sequence 13% 6% 2% 79% Look & Feel 15% 5% 3% 77% UI functionality 4% 12% 2% 83% *some aspects appearing in the article has been left out for brevity. Table 4: Predicted effect of strong copyrights for interfaces* -------------------------------------------------------------- - + Effect 1 2 3 4 5 Own work 35% 36% 19% 7% 2% Industry 57% 29% 4% 7% 3% * 1 = significant negative effect 3 = neutral 5 = significant positive effect -- Lars Fischer, fischer@iesd.auc.dk | NeXT: A disaster looking for a place CS Dept., Univ. of Aalborg, DENMARK. | to happen -- Bill Joy