🚀 go-pugleaf

	Copyrights and patents are economic incentives, and not moral
rights.  This principle is refelcted in Article I, section 8 of the
US constitution which gives congress the power "to promote the Progress of
Science and the useful Arts" (a power which congress has no obligation to
exercise) and then limits this power to a certain strategy, specifically,
"by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive
Rights to their respective Writings and Discoveries."  I've never heard
anyone argue that copyrights and patents stem from any other power of
congress, but even if one were to make such an argument, the supreme
court said in Fox Film vs. Doyal:

		"The sole interest of the United States and the primary
		object in conferring the [copyright] monopoly lie in the
		general benefits derived by the public from the labors of
		authors."

			[from the League For Progamming Freedom's position
			 paper, "Against User Interface Copyright"]

	Therefore, if you want to argue that Lotus should be allowed to
prevent others from using its user interface, you must show that a
user-interface monopoly incentive will benefit the public more than
allowing competitors to duplicate one another's user interfaces.  You
will also have trouble arguing that the Macintosh and 1-2-3 would not
have been created without "look and feel" protection, in light of the
following passage from Pamela Samuelson's May 1989 article in the
Communications of the ACM, titled, "Why the look and feel of software
user interfaces should not be protected by copyright law." 

		"_Look and Feel_ is a phrase invented by two lawyers
		named Jack Russo and Doug Derwin who wrote an article
		in 1985 for a computer law magazine about aspects of
		software user interfaces that the authors thought might
		be protectable by copyright.  It was the first legal
		article to focus attention on software user interface
		protection, and had influence on practitioners in the
		software copyright field.   In some sense, the Lotus
		and Apple cases are the fruit of the intellectual labor
		of these authors."

	According to the biographical information at the end of the article,
Pamela Samuelson is a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh and
teaches intellectual property law.

	Lotus 1-2-3 and the Macintosh were developed before 1985.  One
might argue that Apple's and Lotus's legal departments independently
developed the "look and feel" copyright interpretation before the idea
was mentioned in any professional or academic legal journal, and that
management had such confidence in their legal departments' ability to
predict the outcome of a "look and feel" lawsuit, that they decided to bet
the company's future on a product that they would not have developed
without "look and feel" protection.  At least in Apple's case, however,
you'd have to explain the November 1983 _Byte_ interview, which,
according to the League for Progamming Freedom's bibliography has the
following useful admission.

		The designers of the Apple Lisa GUI admit that they
		went over to Xerox PARC, looked at the GUI's there,
		went back to Apple and redid their GUI to look more
		like Xerox.

	I think that it's more reasonable to believe that MacOS and
1-2-3 were developed without the assumption of "look and feel"
protection, and that anyone who disagrees with that assumption should
present additional evidence to support their position.

Adam J. Richter			adam@soda.berkeley.edu
409 Evelyn Avenue, Apt. 312	....!ucbvax!soda!adam
Albany, CA 94706		Home: (415)528-3209