🚀 go-pugleaf

From: Joachim Laubsch <unido!hpljl.hpl.hp.com!laubsch>
To: mod-ki@unido.informatik.uni-dortmund.de
Date: Wed, 10 Oct 90 16:38:56 pdt
Subject: <mod-ki 0565> Interface copyright laws for Europ.Common Market
Keywords: 

mod-ki message 0565            COPYRIGHT 1990 Hans-Werner Hein, Dortmund
************************************************************************
From:    dupuy@hudson.cs.columbia.edu (Alexander Dupuy)
To:      league-activists@ai.mit.edu
Subject: News from Europe: proposed software copyright laws amended

There's  a  short  article   by   John  J. Xenakis  in   the   October 1
InformationWeek about the recent vote  in  the  European  Parliament  on
software copyright  issues;  he  also  wrote  a  decent  piece  on  user
interface copyight mentioning LPF and RMS for them about  a  month  ago.
This news from Europe is quite a  good  one,  apart  from  the  specific
exemption for user interfaces, but I'll let the beginning of the article
speak for itself:

IS EUROPE SOFT ON CLONES?

In a little known event with major repercussions  for  software  vendors
and users with operations in Europe, the  European  Parliament  recently
voted to significantly weaken the proposed software copyright  laws  for
the European Common Market.

In  order  to  encourage  compatibility  of  software  in  open  systems
environments,  amendments  to  the  copyright  laws  will  exclude   any
interfaces,  except  user   interfaces,   from   copyright   protection.
Furthermore, software and hardware vendors  will  be  permitted  to  use
"reverse engineering" techniques, such as decompilation and disassembly,
to recover source code from object  code  if  that's  the  only  way  to
promote software compatibility or maintenance. The final decision on the
copyright laws will be announced by the Council of Ministers in Brussels
within a few months.

What precisely  the  distinction  between  a  "user"  interface,  and  a
"non-user" interface is unclear, and without access to the text  of  the
proposed law one can't know whether it is well-defined or  not,  but  it
seems to me that there is a  tremendous  potential  for  litigation  and
other confusion on that detail.

Personally, I feel that at the level of graphical "look"  (i.e. specific
visual appearance) though  not  "feel"  (i.e.  methods  of  interaction)
copyright isn't  so  bad.  To  my  mind,  it's  equivalent  to  existing
industrial design copyright. I don't think it's unreasonable  for  users
to be able to visually distinguish  different  programs,  though  it  is
unreasonable to have to interact with them in different ways.

So with the  right  judicial  interpretation  of  "user"  interface,  as
opposed to plain-old  interface,  the  European  legislation  is  almost
exactly what I would have wanted. However, with a  broad  definition  of
"user" interface, it could be weakened significantly. Is there  any  one
of us in Europe that could provide more details on the legislation?

@alex
--
inet: dupuy@cs.columbia.edu
uucp: ...!rutgers!cs.columbia.edu!dupuy
************************************************************************