Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!ames!lll-winken!uunet!odi!dlw From: dlw@odi.UUCP (Dan Weinreb) Newsgroups: gnu.gcc Subject: Re: GNU's not GNU... Message-ID: <292@odi.UUCP> Date: 10 Apr 89 04:22:40 GMT References: <28354@apple.Apple.COM> <8158@polya.Stanford.EDU> <22643@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <23295@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> Organization: Object Design Inc., Burlington, MA Lines: 36 In-reply-to: brooks@vette.llnl.gov's message of 8 Apr 89 23:47:55 GMT In reply to Robert Hsu: Yes, Apple is not claiming ownership of all graphical user interfaces. Yes, Apple is claiming ownership of the Macintosh user interface. Or anything deemed by a court to be substantially identical with it. If you've ever seen a plagurism dispute you know that this can be a tough call sometimes, but other times it's obvious. If Apple and Lotus do win, the next battle will be over how the degree of similarity of two user interfaces is measured: how different do you have to be to avoid lawsuits? If it happens, it'll be a horrible headache for years to come. But no, they are *not* just claiming ownership of the *implementation*. If someone independently implements the same user interface, Apple claims that this is a copyright infringement. RMS has explained why this would be a big problem for FSF, and it would be a big problem for companies and users everywhere. This distinction, between implementation and user interface, is the key point of the "look and feel" disputes. In reply to Eugene Brooks, the present string of decisions and lawsuits are very far from claiming that "gnumake" would be protected had Apple written "make". This is because when they say "look and feel", they mean these words in a colloquial sense. As I said earlier, the basis of this whole string of legal reasoning is cases involving video games. So far, the Apple and Lotus suits have been claiming ownership of "computer screen displays". You and I know that, technically, these aren't very different from "the specification of 'make' as written in a manual", but to the copyright law there is a very big difference. One might worry that if Apple and Lotus win, the *next* step might be to try to extend things even further, in such a way that abstract specifications such as a "make" manual would cause anything that implemented said spec to be protectable by copyright law. This would be an even worse disaster. But to be fair and accurate, we should keep in mind that nobody has even claimed this, yet. {Personally, I think it's unlikely that this would ever manage to happen, but things are volatile and confused right now, and you never can tell.