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The ups and downs of look and feel

Published:01 April 1993Publication History
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  1. The ups and downs of look and feel

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      Anthony L. Clapes

      In this paper, the author of the “Legally Speaking” column and tireless campaigner against copyright protection for computer programs reviews the status of two notable user interface cases. Predictably, she devotes most of her attention to Apple v. Microsoft , in which, to borrow a phrase from the author, a lower court judge “drove a stake through the heart” of the popular Macintosh user interface. She is less expansive about Lotus v. Borland , in which she accuses the judge of not being “attentive to the copyright law,” and in which Borland was found to have infringed the copyright in Lotus 1-2-3. This emphasis may mislead programmers interested in knowing what their legal rights are. Of the two opinions, Lotus is far more important for the computer industry and for computer programmers generally. Its reasoning is far more extensive; it is buttressed by the same court's prior rulings (whereas the Apple court's prior rulings are inconsistent); and, contrary to Samuelson's assertions, Lotus deals with a century of legal precedent in a lucid fashion. Most important, Microsoft was licensed by Apple to copy much of the Macintosh user interface, whereas Borland was not licensed at all by Lotus. Thus, the conclusion that Apple stands for the “more traditional” principle that user interfaces are not protectable, while Lotus stands for the proposition—“not consistent with traditional copyright principles”—that user interfaces are protectable indicates that Samuelson's paper is more editorial than reportage.

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      • Published in

        cover image Communications of the ACM
        Communications of the ACM  Volume 36, Issue 4
        Special issue on graphical user interfaces
        April 1993
        105 pages
        ISSN:0001-0782
        EISSN:1557-7317
        DOI:10.1145/255950
        Issue’s Table of Contents

        Copyright © 1993 ACM

        Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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        Association for Computing Machinery

        New York, NY, United States

        Publication History

        • Published: 1 April 1993

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