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From: dee@cca.CCA.COM (Donald Eastlake)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.ibm.pc,comp.sys.mac,comp.sys.apple
Subject: Re: Copyrighting Icons
Message-ID: <27620@cca.CCA.COM>
Date: 3 May 88 13:27:51 GMT
References: <24@imspw6.UUCP> <1522@dataio.Data-IO.COM> <1707@pixar.UUCP> <585@nvuxr.UUCP>
Reply-To: dee@CCA.CCA.COM.UUCP (Donald Eastlake)
Organization: Computer Corp. of America, Cambridge, MA
Lines: 39

In article <585@nvuxr.UUCP> larryl@nvuxr.UUCP (L Lang) writes:
>In article <1522@dataio.Data-IO.COM> bright@dataio.UUCP (Walter Bright) writes:
>>A lot of people think that small icons should be copyrightable. If your icons
>>are, say, 16 * 16, then there are 65,000 possible icons. Anyone can simply
>>copyright all combinations, and then prevent anyone else from using
>>*any* 16*16 icons. This is obviously ludicrous.
>Hmm...  If there are 16*16 pixels in the icon, each of which may be on or off,
>then aren't there
>	2^(16*16) = 115,792,089,237,316,195,423,570,985,008,687,907,853,269,
>			984,665,640,564,039,457,584,007,913,129,639,936
>possible icons, rather than
>	2^16      = 65536

(1) Copyrighting protects only against copying.  Even if there were only
65,000 of them, you have to show that someone COPIED to get them on
copyright infringement.  Anyone who makes one up independently is not
violating your copyright.

(2) If you are thinking of tradmarking them, it would be a bit hard to
show that in the mind of the product's audience, each and every possible
icon is associated with and identifies you as the source.

(3) Even if you could tradmark them all or print a copyrighted book of
them all and force everyone to look at it ( so they would be "copying"
if they used on), you still would not win, in my opinion, as icons are
the only way to do a number of things on many systems.  The courts have
had no problem in declaring that you can't stop someone from using the
only, or one of a few, functional ways of doing something just by
copyright.  You need something much stronger like a patent for that.
This is one reason why the general rule is that when you copyright
something, the "title" is not protected.  Titles tend to be short and
there are not enough of them to go around if they all have to be unique.
Seems to me that an icon is like a title in many ways.  Of course, some
well known and easily recognizable titles may have become legitimate
trademarks.
-- 
	+1 617-969-9570		Donald E. Eastlake, III
	ARPA: dee@CCA.CCA.COM	usenet:	{cbosg,decvax,linus}!cca!dee
	P. O. Box N, MIT Branch P. O., Cambridge, MA 02139-0903 USA