In the context of the discussion on the possibility of protecting a site taxonomy using one of the intellectual property arguments, Jared mentioned the case of Lotus v. Borland. Unfortunately, he got the outcome of that case wrong. I wouldn't ordinarily point this out, but it's actually something that's very important for people in our business.
On Sun, Aug 17, 2008 at 2:43 PM, Jared Spool <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Copyright infringement is probably the most likely. There's precedent for > this: Lotus won a case over Bourland for the Lotus 1-2-3 command structure. > (There was also an Apple v. Microsoft Look & Feel suit that Apple lost, but > that was mostly because the judge decided that Apple was reneging on a > previous licensing deal.) > You can get a rather simplistic discussion of the outcome of the case via Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_v._Borland, but the key point is called out there. Some of you may recall the time when the spreadsheet accounting program Lotus 1-2-3 was the reason people bought PCs. A competitor, Borland's Quattro Pro, came out and incorporated an interesting option, you could elect to use a menu system that matched the one used by Lotus. Lotus sued for copyright infringement related to the menuing system and won in the trial court. On appeal, however, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit reversed the trial court decision, essentially holding that the menu system was a method of operation and therefore not subject to copyright protection. The US Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal from Lotus and this case stands today as usable precedent for the proposition that operational interface elements are not themselves copyrightable. Copyright adheres to the method of implementation, not its functional expression in the interface. Please note this is totally different from the ING claim of trademark infringement, which has to do with a unique visual expression of the menuing system. What this means for the assertion intellectual property right in a website taxonomy, I'm not prepared to say. There are certainly many people and organizations claiming copyright in specialized taxonomies they've created (just do a Google search for taxonomy copyright to find some). Take all of what I'm saying with the requisite grain of salt, while IWAL (I was a lawyer), I haven't practiced in quite some time, and when I did, IP wasn't my specialty :~) Tal ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
