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In article <1991Oct30.210639.26146@m.cs.uiuc.edu> coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu writes:
>rms@dist.dist.unige.it (Richard M Stallman) writes:
>>Besides, Apple *made the decision* to develop the Mac knowing full
>>well that, at the time, everyone agreed that interfaces could not be
>>copyrighted.  So you can't say people won't make that kind of
>>investment without more monopolies.
>
>This is not clear. Remember, Xerox thought -- at the time -- that user
>interfaces were copyrightable, since they both restricted access to
>their developments (since such disclosure might be considered to reduce
>their rights) and required licenses before they disclosed most of their
>developments. 

Let me say that I don't know whether Xerox believed user interfaces
to be copyrightable before, say, the mid-1980s.  It would be interesting
to hear from someone who worked, for instance, at PARC during that
time to find out whether that was a common belief.

However, I don't think that the behavior you cite is convincing
evidence that Xerox did believe UIs copyrightable.  How does
one reduce one's copyright rights by "disclosure", or by requiring
licenses before disclosure?  This sounds a lot *more* like the
behavior of someone who has an eye on trade secret law, where
disclosure is an important concept and the precautions one takes
to avoid it are highly relevant to the protection one gets from
the law.

Furthermore, in the early 1980s the copyright law for software
was rather uncertain--there were real questions, for example,
about whether it even covered binary executable code, particularly
in ROM (which was resolved in _Apple v. Franklin_).  I think
that the climate tended to suggest that the scope of copyright
law for software would be small rather than expansive.

So, it seems to me that Xerox's behavior would have been consistent
with a belief that trade secret law, rather than copyright law,
would protect the UI development work it was doing (until Xerox
chose to make its work public), and that this belief would have
been consistent with a prevailing view of the copyright law at
the time.

Does anyone have more direct evidence of Xerox having claimed a
UI copyright during that time?

>  Apple isn't the first company to claim that user
>interfaces can be copyrighted; in fact, there were successful lawsuits
>on the subject before the Macintosh came out (mostly in the video-game
>area). 

I believe the video-game cases had to do with "attract mode"--
that is, the display the game puts on to convince you to drop
in a quarter--rather than a user interface as one usually
thinks of it.  The distinction is important because the 
attract mode might be deemed an audiovisual work, which is
explicitly a protectable class of works.  The most questionable
part of UI copyright, from the point of view of traditional
copyright doctrine, lies in the interaction with the user--
traditionally copyright has explicitly not protected functional
behavior.  For example, the copyright on a set of blueprints
for a machine would not be infringed by a machine that followed
those blueprints.  (At least, this is traditional copyright
doctrine.  Perhaps today that doctrine has been effectively
destroyed by cases like _Paperback_.)

In any case, I stand ready to be corrected--was there a 
videogame case which covered the interactive behavior of
the game?

Michael
---
Michael Callahan
michael@smectos.gang.umass.edu
callahan@maths.oxford.ac.uk