What the user interface field thinks of the software copyright “look and feel” lawsuits (and what the law ought to do about it)

Abstract

The software copyright look and feel lawsuits have created a climate of uncertainty in the user interface design field [3, 4]. Although individuals may have opinions about how these lawsuits should be decided, it is difficult for them to know how representative their views are. This column will report on a survey on the user interface field's perspective on these lawsuits which was conducted at the sixth ACM Conference on Computer-Human Interaction (CHI '89) on May 2, 1989. This forum was chosen because the annual CHI meeting is the largest gathering of user interface researchers, designers, and developers-the people who have the most to gain or lose by the outcome of the look and feel controversy. (An in-depth report on the survey findings, which includes detailed statistical analysis, is available [4]). The column will compare the results of this survey with a report jointly written by 10 intellectual property scholars[1] concerning copyright protection for look and feel and other aspects of user interfaces. The CHI survey results are, in general, consistent with the scholars' conclusions based on copyright principles.[4] The legal experts see a basis in copyright law for denying copyright protection to look and feel, which is what the user interface field thinks would be in the field's best interest.