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Apple Forces Aqua Themes Off themes.org
Teferi writes "I was browsing t.o and just noticed this - Apple has apparently sent a Cease and Desist letter to themes.org stating that several of the OSX-look themes up othere are copyright violations, because they use the Apple logo in one or two small places (like this theme). " I've actually exchanged mail with OctobrX on this one, and read the C&D letter. Apple's stating violation based on using of copyrighted materials - the Mac OS and Apple logos in this case. Hopefully, now that Apple is talking with the creator of the themes, things can be resolved amicably, and the themes restored - but for the meantime, the themes have been pulled.
If apple con stop and force themes off, then now what is stopping movie companies from stoping themes based on movies? Such as the common fav matrix theme (dont know why) things that Im sure the producers and the file company would love to see removed and then paid for.
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As someone on themes.org said, this is purely a trademark issue, since they left other themes that do not use the Apple symbol, but do use a MacOS look alone, e.g., Aqua.
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remove the trademaked icon and post it again. no problem ...
A.) If you remember a few weeks ago, Linus Torvalds had to do a similiar thing with people that were using the Linux logo and violating the Linux copyright. Most people were able to understand how Linus could be so worried about the Linux name, but when Apple does the same thing, many people on Slashdot are getting upset. Apple has to defend their copyrights or they risk having a more major copyright infringement go unpunished because they wouldn't punish the smaller ones.
B.) Honestly, if you designed an operating system and someone else designed an OS (over even a theme) that LOOKED like yours, down to the logos - wouldn't you be a little upset too?
I hope that Apple will be understanding and allow Themes.org to repost the themes with the Apple logo's removed. But I have to agree with what they are doing.
kwsNI
IMO, Apple acted perfectly responsibly. The Apple logo is a trademark, and if a trademark is not protected, you lose it. That means that Apple has to look around on places like themes.org for violations. Obviously, they don't care if people emulate their UI, since other themes were left intact. I think Apple acted responsibly.
Or a bananna instead of the apple? There's enough fruit for everyone.
They missed quite a few themes that include the Macintosh logo. Well, at least one, this one. Not that I am asking for them to be removed, but is it really Macintosh logos they're after, or is it they don't want MacOSX look alikes? Cant' help but to wonder eventhough I am familiar with copyright laws and Mac's need to enforce it (or loose it). Could be they just didn't notice these other themes.
The idea is to prevent consumer confusion. A movie logo on a software product is not likely to cause the software to be mistaken for the movie. A computer manufacturer's logo on a software product is likely to cause at least some people to assume that the product was made by the company whose logo appears in the product.
-- Two men say they're Jesus. One of them must be wrong. - Dire Straits
I wasn't real sure on this one...so I called my uncle who is a copyright lawyer. He says that if a company begins letting people use their trademark without giving them credit, they may very well lose any trademark battle they have. So, although those themes may have been made out of respect...if Apple takes someone to court for using their trademark because it was done negatively, there is a good chance that by throwing the fact that others use their trademark without displaying that it is Apple's tm, that they will not win the court battle. Otherwise, once you let one person use it without them showing that it is trademarked...it would be difficult to stop another person from using it.
Seems that a lot of people here do not realise what I think you meant to say, but didn't quite get out.
Since the Apple logo is a trademark...
Apple MUST agressively protect it, or they will LOSE the rights to said trademark. The same applies to ANY trademark.
Did't Linus have to shutdown an auction of *linux*.* domain names not too long ago? Well that's the same thing. The holder of a trademark, be it Apple or Linux or Sun or whoever, can NOT ignore ANY transgression. If they DO, they lose the rights to that mark.
Yeah, I know that's bass ackwards. Buy that's out wonderful intellectual property laws. Oppressively strict protection in some places, ridiculously loose in others. Seems that they are written only to provide income for lawyers, not protect the intrest of consumers OR producers.... (sigh).
john
Imagine all the people...
So what's the problem? If there were any evidence that Apple had been vicious or overbearing about (Remove these themes This Instant or we'll break you and your site) I would understand people being upset. But from what little evidence is available this sounds as if it was a polite reminder that Apple has to protect those trademarks or lose them, and those themes are in violation. If someone knows otherwise, say so.
Pug
Whether they're called Faith, Axioms, or Assumptions,
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Twice.
Once when they were first formed. McCartney and his merry little band of legal jackals attacked Apple when it was still Jobs and Woz working out of their garage, introducing Apple Computer to the wonderful world of litigation.
They tried to get Apple to change it's name to various other fruits, like Orange and Banana. Sonn enough tho, Jobs and co. hired competent legal council and found out that the beatles had no legal leg to stand on, so long as Apple was in the computer business, not the music business.
Not content with peaceful coexistence, misters "we're better than Jeasus" kept an eye on Apple from afar, waiting until they were a big company with lots of money they could extort, rather than two kids in a garage.
The beatles sued again when Apple released a Macintosh that had the POTENTIAL to used with MIDI. This was settled out of court for one of those infamous "undisclosed sums".
Incidently, that lawsuit was the origin of the "sosumi" beep in the Mac sound control panel. It was originally to be called "xylophone" (spelling?)... but Apple's legal dept thought that having a mucical insturment named in the OS woulod hurt Apple's case against mccartney and his minions. So the engineers renamed the beep "sosumi". They spelled it out over the phone to the approving lawyer, telling him it was a Jappanese word for "peace and harmony" or sone such. The legal dept agreed, and thus a beep was born.
Both cases (and the development of the "Sosumu" beep) can be read about in more detail in Owen Linzmeyers: "The Mac Bathroom Reader" or the sequel by the same author *title of the sequel escapes me tho).
john
Imagine all the people...
B.) Honestly, if you designed an operating system and someone else designed an OS (over even a theme) that LOOKED like yours, down to the logos - wouldn't you be a little upset too?
Absolutely not! I would do exactly what Apple did, but I'd never be upset about it.
US trademark law requires that Apple do this in order to defend their trademark and copyright interests. If they don't Microsoft could then use the Apple logo and successfully argue that Apple is being selective about who it goes after, and Apple might lose the trademark.
On the other hand, if I had designed the Mac look and feel, I would be thrilled that it was so instantly adopted by so much of my competition! The rapid adoption of the Aqua look and feel means that Apple did good user-interface wise. I use Aqua under Sawmill and Gtk+ (actually AquaX under Sawmill) and I think it's one of the best innovations in desktop look-and-feel so far. First off, why did it take this long for people to think of color-coding window baubles? It certainly improves the ease-of-use for me. Also, horizontal pin-striping struck me as a bad idea at first, but somehow it adds something to my desktop. It almost seems as if the applications are more "crafted".
Apple did a great job here, and they know that every innovation will be coppied by the rest of the market. In a way, I'm sure this is why they went for such a radical look. They want everyone to say "oh yeah, that's the new Mac look". Microsoft would call this "mindshare".
stating violation based on using of copyrighted materials - the Mac OS and Apple logos in this case.
This is one of my pet peeves, right up there with misspelling "lose" as "loose". Copyrights are, as the name implies, the right to copy something. Trademarks are logos and words which are used by companies to identify and distinguish themselves.
Trademark law has one important difference from copyright law, and that's the "enforce it or lose it" clause. If Apple didn't go after these and other unauthorized uses of its trademarks, it could end up losing the rights to them. It's much worse with words, and Xerox has a never-ending battle to avoid having their company name become a generic word.
If copyright law was like this, it would either be complete anarchy (it's too easy to copy something in private) or a complete police state (to hunt down every instance of illegally copied material).
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
This is a trademark issue. That's a very different beast. Why? Consider: all the theme makers have to do is replace the Apple logo with something else and then they can repost the themes. They don't have to change anything else. I'd say that the Apple logo in the corner isn't a critical part of the theme's "look and feel."
Personally, I do find it to be in extremely poor taste that these theme makers are ripping off a GUI that hasn't even been released yet. Sure, it's not illegal, but it's only fair to let the company that came up with that GUI be the first to release it to the world. If you still want it on your machine, then release the theme after that. But Apple did the work on the GUI; I don't see what's so unfair about them wanting to release it first. They can't do anything about it now, I know, but I don't see why the themers couldn't have just left well enough alone and waited till after OSX's release (or at least until after OSX DP3's release) to turn their themes loose.
There was a big stink at skinz.org over the WinAqua skin for WindowBlinds; Apple seemed to drop their objections to that skin as soon as the author removed the logo.
Weblogging Considered Harmful:
Ok, maybe that's too harsh.
Still, I think Apple would have done better contacting the authors of the themes directly, and asking politely instead of ordering. If done properly, it might have actually built them good will ("hey, Apple was really cool about it"), instead of reminding everyone of their propensity to sue.
Jon
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
I usually don't take the time to reply to posts on /., however yours is so blatantly inaccurect that I can't stop myself from replying:
MacOS's interface largely uses that ugly 'Chicago' font (an insult to Chicago). I presume (or hope) that you can change this, but how many of MacOS's tech-savvy users (if there are any? ::grin::) are going to do this?
- It's been changed to charcoal since MacOS 8.5 which came out more then a year ago...
- As to whether or not it's a good thing that you be limited in your choice of font for the U.I., well isn't that a question of standardization? I mean, I know people that use large fonts of unknown origin on windows (fonts which I personnaly find very ugly). Sure, Windows will let them make that choice; however it won't properly resize the dialog boxes afterwards... Doesn't it make more sense to limit the user's choice to fonts for which you can guarantee uniformity of the U.I.?
When a message box comes with up with Yes and No buttons, you can't just press Y or N. You have to click.
-Nope, you can most usually click Command-y and Command-n or Esc for cancel. It's been there for a while. Of course if the program makes its own dialog box, the OS can't really do much.
You can't just enter to select a button on a message box which has the focus. Again, you have to click.
-With almost no exception, all dialog boxes always have one button in evidence (represented by a different larger button contour). Pressing the Enter key is the equivalent of activating that button. This has been in the system at least since the Mac Plus era...
You can't move between the buttons a message box with the arrow keys. How un-intuitive.
-I suppose that's more a design decision then anything else. Why would you want to move from button to button if you can activate then using the command-keys ? Redundancy, in my opinion, is mostly a very good way of losing beginner users...
The menus don't have access keys. This is a really annoying feature. Again, you have to click. Admittedly some menu items do have shortcut keys, but you can't access all the items this way, as you can with access keys.
-I'm not sure I see why this would be annoying. If the user is supposed to have and use a mouse, why would he need to be able to do everything by keyboard? Moreover, to do so you'd have to show which key activates which menu, isn't that more information to overload your user with? Finally, to assign a command to all menus and sub-menus always brings up problems; do you really feel that the keys associated with the menu activation or the sub-menu activation on windows are intuitive. In my opinion, the letters often (but not always) have no intuitive relation with the option I'm trying to activate.
-As I look at my netscape, on Linux, I realize that these menus also don't offer keyboard activation (at least if it's feasible, it's not written on the screen). But I know that Alt-F will activate the Find option and Alt-N will bring up a new window. I'm not sure if I need much more from the keyboard but what I am sure about is that I can live with an OS that feels I'll know how to use a mouse to reach the other options/commands.
-For what it's worth, Connectix has been offering what your looking for (all menus, all sub-menus by keyboard) as an option since Speed Doubler 2. Used to work pretty well on my PB190 for those rare times when I didn't want to use the trackpad (which I just didn't like).
Give me a Windows 95/98/2000/NT theme any day. I admit that macs are generally more user friendly (albeit at the expensive of processing power) but some of the points of the interface are just so terrible!
-Although I'm probably just being really picky, I don't believe that you can just make the claim that macs offer a more user friendly U.I at the expense of processing power; remember that Win98 is the OS that allows to have a web page as a background...
As for whether or not the interface is so terrible; I hope, given all the unfounded statements you made and which I tried by the preceding to correct, that you'll change your mind or at least take the time to go back and try a mac before restating anything on an open forum...
I'm not sure why people have to STOP using the trademarked symbol/logo? Isn't it okay if they just document the fact that the symbol/logo is trademarked by so-and-so corporation/individual?