Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!uunet!labrea!rutgers!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!EDDIE.MIT.EDU!think!compass!worley
From: think!compass!worley@EDDIE.MIT.EDU (Dale Worley)
Newsgroups: gnu.emacs
Subject: Some thoughts on "look and feel"
Message-ID: <8809281540.AA07713@galaxy.compass.com>
Date: 28 Sep 88 15:40:22 GMT
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Copyright (and patents) in the US is based on the concept that if the
law gives a limited property-right in intellectual property to the
person who creates it, people will be stimulated to create useful
things.  See, for example, the US Constitution.  I generally agree
with this idea.  ([this is based on a discussion I had with RMS on the
subject:] On the other hand, RMS is that rare breed, a genuine
socialist.  He believes that there is no "true" ownership, that all
property is held in stewardship, and that the concept of "ownership"
of physical objects is only a useful mechanism for allocation of
unsharable resources, rather than a fundamental reality.)

Historically, the boundary between what is copyrightable and what is
not is based on what is the "creative" part of the work.  In practice,
this has meant that the part that is hard to generate is protected,
the window dressing is not.  This makes sense from a commercial point
of view, also, since it protects and stimulates things which are hard
(expensive) to create, and ignores things which are easy (cheap) to
create.

So, what shall we do with user interfaces?  In some cases, clearly so
little work that has gone into them that there is no creative effort
to making them.  On the other hand, for some products the user
interface is a major aspect of the product that required significant
effort to design.  In most cases, the code to implement the user
interface is enormously harder to write than the design of the
interface itself.  In this case, it seems unreasonable that the
interface should be considered a copyrightable work itself.  But over
the long run, as programming becomes more efficient, it may be that
the bulk of the work in producing a user interface may well be the
visual design of it, not the writing of the code that impelments it.

Historically, there has always been a tension between the goal of
providing copyright protection to stimulate work, and the goal of
allowing as many people to produce as many similar products as
possible to improve competition.  The boundaries between these two
regions have always been adjusted on the grounds of "the public good"
-- the determination of what is, on the whole, (economically) better
for society.

It seems like we are entering one of those eras when technology
changes "what is the expensive part of a work", and thus causes the
law to change "what copyright protects".  This is much like the late
1800s, when the invention of cheap paper (and thus the rise of
mass-production printing) changed the expensive part of a book from
being the paper to the words.  Before that, writers were hired by
booksellers so they could sell paper, and copyright wasn't too
important.  Unless you are either a libertarian or an RMS-ist, you
have to recognize the boundaries will always be shifting.

Dale