Path: utzoo!utgpu!watmath!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!decwrl!purdue!krk
From: krk@cs.purdue.EDU (Kevin Kuehl)
Newsgroups: gnu.gcc
Subject: Re: Apple Employees Please Note
Message-ID: <6939@medusa.cs.purdue.edu>
Date: 15 Jun 89 22:52:01 GMT
References: <8906080252.AA02091@wheat-chex.ai.mit.edu> <2376@internal.Apple.COM>
Sender: news@cs.purdue.EDU
Distribution: gnu
Organization: Department of Computer Science, Purdue University
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> A personal indulgence follows.  Please read carefully before
> flaming.

This isn't a flame.  It is just how I see things.

>    Opinion: Anyone who thinks a good user interface is less the intellectual 
> property of its designer than a system's source code is the intellectual 
> property of its author must surely never have designed a particularly good  
> user interface.  If the FSF would like to design a GNU user interface and 
> copyleft it, that's perfectly valid, and if they influence the Congress to 
> amend the copyright law to limit the protection of intellectual property, 
> that's valid too, but claiming that a user interface design is not 
> intellectual property seems silly.

I think your comparision is a good one for the position of not having
a user interface's "look-and-feel" copyrightable.  By my
understanding, if Apple would win this, then I think AT&T would be
able to copyright the unified Input/Output system of Unix.  And
whoever came up with the idea of system calls could copyright those
also.  Why?  Because to me, those are an operating system's interface
and would have the "look-and-feel" of an operating system just like
the Apple "look-and-feel" of its user interface.  And you say yourself
that they both are intellectual property and if I assume correctly,
they are of equal value to you.

This seems quite unpractical, very difficult to retroactively enforce,
and would be very detrimental to progress.  For example, I learned how
to program on the operating system OS-9.  It is a nearly identical
copy to Unix in its high-level operating system interaction.  The main
difference was that it could fit where Unix could not.  If AT&T could
copyright its input/output system and someone else copyrighted system
calls, then really nice pieces of software like this probably would
never see the light of day in the future.  This seems very scary to me
because all I would have to claim is that whatever I invented had a
"look-and-feel" about it and I could copyright that idea and prevent
someone else from selling something similar.

Oh well, just my two cents.
Kevin