Xref: utzoo gnu.misc.discuss:3177 comp.misc:12633 comp.dcom.modems:9859 Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!mintaka!ai-lab!life!tmb From: tmb@ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel) Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss,comp.misc,comp.dcom.modems Subject: Re: hayes lawsuit Message-ID: Date: 20 May 91 22:27:45 GMT References: <1991May19.123246.6857@unlinfo.unl.edu> Sender: news@ai.mit.edu Distribution: usa Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab Lines: 22 In-reply-to: sef@kithrup.COM's message of 21 May 91 17:21:18 GMT In article <1991May21.172118.22744@kithrup.COM> sef@kithrup.COM (Sean Eric Fagan) writes: (Devil's advocate mode) Ah, but if I spend millions of dollars researching and developing a wonderful user interface, and someone can just "knock off" a clone of it, why should I bother with doing the research at all? (Incidently, this is why UI copyrights are even worse than patents.) There are two major reasons. One is that you couldn't just invest millions of dollars and get back a good user interface even if you wanted to. Good user interfaces seem to be built by a continual feedback between users and implementors. This has been the case with most of the good user interfaces that I have used, and, as far as I can tell, it has also been the case to a large degree with the Macintosh user interface. The other reason is that most of the hard work in building a good interface is in the detail and politics, not in any kind of idea that needs to be protected by anything but copyright. A good user interface requires virtually bug-free implementations with great attention to detail, as well as enough influence to enforcing consistency. Thomas.