The fast food analogy feels weird to me because of trademark implications. The analogy I would use is, should the shape and usage of a steering wheel be copyri

The fast food analogy feels weird to me because of trademark implications. The analogy I would use is, should the shape and usage of a steering wheel be copyrightable? Should a company be able to prevent someone else from building a car that has the same steering wheel, stick-shift, break on the left/gas on the right interface? After all, you could easily argue that building an intuitive car interface was a difficult, creative act. A ton of work has gone into making modern cars intuitive, and it's not like any of that design is obvious or trivial. The answer to that question has profound implications for the ability of businesses to compete, and much more profound implications for our general ability as consumers to get products that act the way we expect, and to avoid radical amounts of vendor lock in. Imagine a world where the interface for shifting gears was different for every car brand, or where notifications like turn signals, or errors like a check engine light couldn't be copied. It would make the automotive market uniformly more annoying, more dangerous, and less competitive.