Why the look and feel of software user interfaces should not be protected by copyright law
Communications of the ACM
Protecting user interfaces through copyright: the debate
CHI '89 Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
A concern about the Samuelson-Glushko survey
ACM SIGCHI Bulletin - Special issue: Computer supported cooperative work
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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.