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1991-04-10
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From fischer@iesd.auc.dk Mon Jun 4 07:37:04 1990
From: fischer@iesd.auc.dk (Lars P. Fischer)
Newsgroups: gnu.misc.discuss,comp.cog-eng
Subject: User Interface Copyrights
Date: 3 Jun 90 20:05:16 GMT
Organization: Mathematics and Computer Science, University of Aalborg
I would like to call attention to the "Legally Speaking" column of the
May issue of the CACM. In this article, Pamela Samuelson and Robert J.
Glushko report on a poll they did at the ACM CHI conference in May
'89 (CHI '89). Basically, they did the following: they invited two
lawyers to speak on the issue of UI Copyrights. An Apple lawyer told
the audience why UI Copyrights is good thing. Another lawyer told the
audience why not. After this, a poll was taken. 667 people answered
various questions (e.g. "Do you think UIs should be copyrightable?").
The article presents some tables with results from the poll. These are
reproduced at the end of this posting. Looking at table 1 and 2, we
see that the respondents were mainly designers, researchers, and
engineers from industry, r&d institutions, and academia. Looking at
table 3, we see that these people are, in general, in favor of
copyrights on computer software (source and object code). That's a
shame, but note that there is a strong opposition to copyrights on
"Look & Feel" and other aspects of user interfaces. Now, if we look at
table 4, we see that most of the respondents felt that UI copyrights
would make it more difficult for them to carry out their work, and
would severely harm the industry at large.
Let's stop a moment and consider. The respondents are representatives
of the people that design and create user interfaces, both
practitioners and managers. We have both commercial and non-commercial
interests. Now, these people don not think UI copyrights is a good
idea. They don't like the idea because they believe that UI copyrights
will make it harder to design good interfaces, and will slow down
progress in the UI field.
Well, why is it we have copyright law in the first place? Copyright
law exists to stimulate progress. The reasoning is that if we do not
protect investments in research and development, no one will do it, and
so progress will come to a halt. Ah, but in the case of user
interfaces, we *do* have progress (lots of it) *without* protection.
And the people in the field feel that protection will make it *harder*
to progress further. Therefore, user interface copyrights is a "bad
thing". And therefore, the people in the field are opposed to the
idea.
The CACM article presents lots of additional material and legal
argument (the authors are lawyers). In all, the article presents very
strong arguments against UI interface copyrights. I would recommend it
to anyone interested in the issue. The article demonstrates that the
FSF is not alone with its views on the matter but in fact is largely
consistent with the views of those in the user interface field. The
article also argues that there are legal arguments in favor of the FSF
view. So, everybody get together and tell Apple and friends to stuff
it.
/Lars
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Table 1: Respondent population by Job function.
-----------------------------------------------
UI designer 44 %
Researcher 32 %
Software engineer 29 %
Human Factors engineer 15 %
Manager 15 %
Faculty 8 %
Consultants 6 %
Students 6 %
Table 2: Respondent population by employer.
--------------------------------------------
Computer manufacturer 26 %
R & D organization 23 %
University 20 %
Software vendor 14 %
Other 14 %
Table 3: Support for copyright and/or patent for software aspects.*
------------------------------------------------------------------
aspect cop. pat. both neither
Source code 71% 10% 12% 7%
Object code 65% 10% 11% 15%
Algorithms 8% 32% 7% 53%
Commands 6% 4% 2% 88%
Screen Layout 25% 4% 2% 69%
Screen Sequence 13% 6% 2% 79%
Look & Feel 15% 5% 3% 77%
UI functionality 4% 12% 2% 83%
*some aspects appearing in the article has been left out for brevity.
Table 4: Predicted effect of strong copyrights for interfaces*
--------------------------------------------------------------
- +
Effect 1 2 3 4 5
Own work 35% 36% 19% 7% 2%
Industry 57% 29% 4% 7% 3%
* 1 = significant negative effect
3 = neutral
5 = significant positive effect
--
Lars Fischer, fischer@iesd.auc.dk | NeXT: A disaster looking for a place
CS Dept., Univ. of Aalborg, DENMARK. | to happen -- Bill Joy