🚀 go-pugleaf

One reason Look&Feel is currently a copyright issue rather than a patent
issue is that it originally was used primarily to protect the Look, and not
so much the Feel.  One of the original software applications of L&F was in
video games.  The maker of the original PacMan sued the vendor of a clone
for a home video game, on the basis that the screen images (the look) had
been copied almost pixel for pixel.  There may also have been some "feel"
cloning, in that the movements of the characters may also have been
duplicated.  The case was settled out of court, and I believe that part of
the settlement was that the shapes of many of the characters and other part
of the image were changed so that they didn't resemble the original, but
the game was still basically the same.

Look is still very much a copyright issue, but feel does seem like it
should be covered by patent.  Lotus's suits are mostly feel-based (example:
could one escape their clutches by moving the command line from the top to
the bottom), but Apple's suits include quite a bit of look.  You can't
patent a particular trash can icon, and probably can't patent putting it in
the lower-right corner, but you *can* (currently) copyright screen layouts
(including icons, but I think you'd have a hard time copyrighting an icon
all by itself, although maybe you could trademark it as a logo).

A simple litmus test for whether something is look versus feel is whether
you have to *use* it.  You can tell that two screen images are copies of
each other just by looking at them, but you can't tell that two
spreadsheets provide the same user interface until you start typing
commands at them.

I think the reason "feel" is stuck together with "look" is because computer
screen layouts are dynamic and variable, and the copyright holder holds
rights to the ordered set of images that result from using the program,
minus the users' data.


--
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
{uunet,harvard}!think!barmar