🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <48541@ut-emx.uucp> timbur@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Tim Burnett) writes:
>Society derives a benefits [from user interface copyrights].
>Innovative companies can stay in business. If
>anyone can copy someones ideas after a company spends 4+ years designing it,
>the few companies will take the risk. Society will receive user interfaces
>that are rushed to market because companies will not spend the resources to
>develop better ideas

	Suppose that it could be shown that these innovations or equivalent
ones would have been devleoped anyhow without the user interface copyright
incentive.  Do you agree that, if that were true, then it would not be
in the public's interest to extend user interface copyrights to companies
(given the high cost of litigatation and the way that they reign in other
people's development efforts)?

>Very few on the Macintosh interfaces ideas are "trivialities". Many have been
>designed through extensive and expensive research. Other companies should
>have to pay for that research if they want the result.

	As I have pointed out before, the legal article that apparently
kicked off the idea that copyright monopolies could be interpretted to
extend to a program's user interface was published long after the Mac
was developedd.  The Apple developers felt no qualms about admitting
to having copied the Xerox GUI ideas before the "look and feel"
lawsuits, which suggests that Apple didn't think that they could copyright
the Macintosh user interface when they developed it.  Therefore, the
Macintosh user interface would have been devloped without the incentive
of a user interface copyright, seeing as that that is exactly what
happened.

	Are there any examples of existing programs that you can prove
would not have been devloped without a user interface copyright (either
in the US or elsewhere)?

Adam J. Richter			adam@soda.berkeley.edu
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