Why the look and feel of software user interfaces should not be protected by copyright law

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Why the look and feel of software user interfaces should not be protected by copyright law

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Communications of the ACM archive
Volume 32 , Issue 5 (May 1989) table of contents

Pages: 563 - 572

Year of Publication: 1989

ISSN:0001-0782

Author

P. Samuelson

Emory Law School, Atlanta, GA

Publisher

ACM New York, NY, USA

Bibliometrics

Downloads (6 Weeks): 4, Downloads (12 Months): 27, Citation Count: 6

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ABSTRACT

An attorney looks at how copyright law is applied to the protection of software user interfaces and makes a strong case for reevaluating the way the law views software.

CITED BY 6

	G. Perlman, Asynchronous design/evaluation methods for hypertext technology development, Proceedings of the second annual ACM conference on Hypertext, p.61-81, November 1989, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
	Larry Press, Personal computing, Communications of the ACM, v.33 n.2, p.115-119, Feb. 1990
	Pamela Samuelson , Robert J. Glushko, Legally speaking, Communications of the ACM, v.33 n.5, p.483-487, May 1990
	Joseph Farrell, Arguments for weaker intellectual property protection in network industries, StandardView, v.3 n.2, p.46-49, June 1995
	John C. Nash, A hypertext environment for using mathematical software: part 1—motivations and design objectives, ACM SIGNUM Newsletter, v.25 n.3, p.2-14, Jul. 1990
	Pamela Samuelson , Robert F. J. Glushko, What the user interface field thinks of the software copyright “look and feel” lawsuits (and what the law ought to do about it), ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, v.22 n.2, p.13-17, Oct. 1990