Court case
The district court ruled that
it would require a standard of
"virtual identity" between Windows and the
Macintosh at
trial in order for Apple to prove copyright infringement.
Apple
believed this to be too narrow of a standard and that
a more broad "look and
feel" was all that should be
necessary at trial. As a result, both parties
agreed that a
jury trial was unnecessary given the rulings, and Apple
filed an
appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in
order to have the district
court's characterization
overruled.[5]
After the district court ruled in
favor of Microsoft, Apple
appealed the decision arguing that the district court
only
considered infringements on the individual elements of
Apple's GUI,
rather than the interface as a whole. The
appeals court almost entirely
affirmed the ruling of the
district court, establishing that, "almost all the
similarities spring either from the license or from basic
ideas and their
obvious expression... illicit copying could
occur only if the works as a whole
are virtually identical."
[1] However, the circuit court did reverse the
district
court's decision not to award attorney's fees to Microsoft,
clarifying and sending the case back to the district court
to resolve the
issue.
The circuit court dissected the GUI, following the lead of
the
district court, in order to separate expression from
ideas (as expression, but
not ideas, are covered by
copyright law).[6] The court outlined five ideas that
it
identified as basic to a GUI desktop: windows, icon images
of office items,
manipulations of icons, menus, and the
opening and closing of objects.[1] The
court established
that Apple could not make copyright claims based on these
ideas and could only make claims on the precise expression
of them.
The
court also pointed out that many of Apple's claims fail
on an originality
basis. Apple admittedly licensed many of
its representations from Xerox, and
copyright protection
only extends to original expression. Apple returned to its
"complete look and feel" argument, stating that while the
individual
components were not original, the complete GUI
was. The court rejected these
arguments because the parts
were not original.
Impact
Because
much of the court's ruling was based on the original
licensing agreement
between Apple and Microsoft for Windows
1.0, it made the case more of a
contractual matter than of
copyright law, to the chagrin of Apple. This also
meant that
the court avoided a more far-reaching "look and feel
copyright"
precedent ruling. However, the case did establish
that the analytic dissection
(rather than the general "look
and feel") of a user interface is vital to any
copyright
decision on such matters.
