> The court ruled that, "Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law]...". In the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit, Xerox also sued Apple alleging that Mac's GUI was heavily based on Xerox's. The district court dismissed Xerox's claims without addressing whether Apple's GUI infringed Xerox's. Apple lost all claims in the Microsoft suit except for the ruling that the trash can icon and folder icons from Hewlett-Packard's NewWave windows application were infringing. The lawsuit was filed in 1988 and lasted four years; the decision was affirmed on appeal in 1994, and Apple's appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied.
And then later on:
> After the district court ruled in favor of Microsoft, Apple appealed the decision arguing that the district court only considered infringements on the individual elements of Apple's GUI, rather than the interface as a whole. The appeals court almost entirely affirmed the ruling of the district court, establishing that, "almost all the similarities spring either from the license or from basic ideas and their obvious expression... illicit copying could occur only if the works as a whole are virtually identical."
I'm not going to say that copyright expansion isn't a problem, and in general I think that software patents are a giant problem. But surely the answer to that isn't to encourage more expansion or to treat competitors cloning good features like it's something to be avoided.
We should be holding up cases like this as an example of why proprietary developers can't get monopolies on ideas, and we should be normalizing that way of thinking about software. It's not a problem if a proprietary app copies an interface idea from an Open Source app because interface and feature ideas are not copyrightable. We should reinforce in culture that already recognized legal standard whenever possible.
> The court ruled that, "Apple cannot get patent-like protection for the idea of a graphical user interface, or the idea of a desktop metaphor [under copyright law]...". In the midst of the Apple v. Microsoft lawsuit, Xerox also sued Apple alleging that Mac's GUI was heavily based on Xerox's. The district court dismissed Xerox's claims without addressing whether Apple's GUI infringed Xerox's. Apple lost all claims in the Microsoft suit except for the ruling that the trash can icon and folder icons from Hewlett-Packard's NewWave windows application were infringing. The lawsuit was filed in 1988 and lasted four years; the decision was affirmed on appeal in 1994, and Apple's appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court was denied.
And then later on:
> After the district court ruled in favor of Microsoft, Apple appealed the decision arguing that the district court only considered infringements on the individual elements of Apple's GUI, rather than the interface as a whole. The appeals court almost entirely affirmed the ruling of the district court, establishing that, "almost all the similarities spring either from the license or from basic ideas and their obvious expression... illicit copying could occur only if the works as a whole are virtually identical."
I'm not going to say that copyright expansion isn't a problem, and in general I think that software patents are a giant problem. But surely the answer to that isn't to encourage more expansion or to treat competitors cloning good features like it's something to be avoided.
We should be holding up cases like this as an example of why proprietary developers can't get monopolies on ideas, and we should be normalizing that way of thinking about software. It's not a problem if a proprietary app copies an interface idea from an Open Source app because interface and feature ideas are not copyrightable. We should reinforce in culture that already recognized legal standard whenever possible.