Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!morganucodon.cis.ohio-state.edu!paul From: paul@morganucodon.cis.ohio-state.edu (Paul Placeway) Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss Subject: Re: Customizable Interfaces at Risk? Message-ID: Date: 1 Aug 89 18:26:15 GMT References: <8907312348.AA08338@nlp9> Sender: news@tut.cis.ohio-state.edu Reply-To: paul@cis.ohio-state.edu Organization: Ohio State Computer Science Lines: 34 In-reply-to: nli!jym@APPLE.COM's message of 31 Jul 89 23:48:57 GMT nli!jym@APPLE.COM writes: Company A and Company B have a "Look and Feel"-based legal dispute and settle on two different interfaces. The two are much the same, except that A's has pop-up menus and a mailbox icon in the upper right corner and B's has pull-down menus and a mailbox icon in the lower right corner. Now suppose I come along with an interface which, Emacs-style, has loads of user-definable options. My interface makes it possible to choose between pop-up menus and pull-down menus. My interface lets you put a mailbox icon in any of the four corners (and anywhere else on the screen). Thus, it is possible to customize the interface to work like the A's interface or B's interface. Does that mean A *and* B can slap a "Look and Feel" on me? Does the answer depend on whether or I not I've provided templates to help my interface look like their interfaces? If I've documented how to do it? <_Jym_> I would hope not. Sure, A or B could sue the individual purchaser (hopefully not successfully) for makeing a "Look and Feel" like their product using your product, but you as the supplier *should* be in the clear. Look at it this way: if this were not true, then Apple could have sued IBM for producing a product (in this case, the IBM PC) that could be configured to "look and feel" like a Mac. Personally, I think that any company that launched a suit against the producer of a configurable system should be laughed out of court. We'll see see what happens with Apple and HP... -- Paul Placeway