3 ms·

Look and Feel in computers and how it interacts with copyright is hardly something new https://jolt.law.harvard.edu/assets/articlePDFs/v03/03HarvJLTech195.pdf

• anthk 7mo ago
  And Sony vs Bleem (or the IBM BIOS reimplementation) already set a precedent so that doesn't really matter anymore. Look at Wine. Or Exegutor. Or DOSBox. All of them totally legal reimplementing either prior look and feel and functionality.
  • iso1631 7mo ago
    > The code of computer programs are excluded from design protection, but visual aspects of software are very commonly protectable as long as they are ‘new’ (i.e. not a direct copy of anything that has come before) and possess ‘individual character’ (i.e. that the design produces a different ‘overall impression’ than anything that has come before) I'm no expect, but Chris Sawyer style games certainly provided a unique overall impression to me. Whether it needs to be a registered design or not I couldn't say, but it's not going to be cheap to find out. More recent battles have relied on Trademark and Patent law rather than Copyright, but "Look and Feel" is still a legal grey area
    • anthk 7mo ago
      Wine literally copies both the Win32 UI -needed to respect that for interop- , some of the kernel functions and Win32 which is just an API implementation and not copyrighteable per se. If not, we woudn't have GNU. Or Microsoft services for Unix.