Remember the announcement with much fanfare of Apple’s new iPhone product last week? It hasn’t taken long for somebody to come up with a skin for the Treo that looks very much like the user interface of the iPhone. And it’s taken even less time for Apple to complain about it and issue letters to the developer threatening suit for copyright infringement.
Shades of Lotus v. Borland. I thought this had been settled long ago. In L v. B the First Circuit distinguished between the implementation of a user interface and the “look and feel†of the interface finding the implementation subject to copyright but not in effect the user interface itself.
Maybe they were complaining about the pictures.
Come on, Apple: Fashion, IP rights and innovation: How the fashion world gets along without much IP rights enforcement, along with a question for Steve Jobs. If you’re going to market your products like fashion accessories, why shouldn’t the fashion industry’s less stringent approach to IP rights apply?