iMac Look Protected by Copyright

dublin passed along this CNET article reporting that Apple Computer has settled its cases against both Daewoo and Emachines, filed in response to those companies' release of iMac look-alike PCs. Read below for more.

The settlements mean that the preliminary injunction granted by a Federal judge last November, which halted sales of the Emachines eOne on the grounds that it too closely resembled the industrial design of Apple's iMac, may be a taste of the future.

Apple's focus in these suites has been on violations of their "trade dress" -- essentially, seeking copyright which covers the appearance and design of a product rather than its functional aspect. The CNET article points out that "[h]istorically, the courts have not extended trademark protection to a product's design, but more recently, some have begun to grant trademark protection to 'stylized' items on the grounds that novel industrial design can communicate a distinctive idea or image."

Often, however, manufacturers file design patents as well, especially for products with new or unique industrial design. Given Apple's emphasis on ergonomics, color and ease of use, which concretize the abstract results of years of experimentation and testing, it seems likely that design patents will play an expanding role in the protection of their designs. But by no means will Apple be the only company fighting to establish brand identity with distinctive shapes and colors, and taking on imitators in court over trade dress or design patent violations.

dublin (the person who submitted this article) notes, "This could be ugly, because unlike regular patents (which can be readily challenged on the following grounds), design patents have no requirement for either 'utility' or 'non-obviousness to one reasonably schooled in the art.'" Can challenging or affirming a design patent, especially in the moving-target world of personal computers, be anything other than heavily subjective?

Even if the original decision was jutified, (no one is arguing that either the eOne or the Daewoo machines are based on anything other than the shape and color-appeal of the iMac), does this place us on a slippery slope? As dublin puts it, "Does Apple now have universal first dibs on anything wrapped in clear and aqua plastic? (If yes, then how about lime or the dreaded tangerine?)"

Comments

Who gives a wet one?

[Anonymous Coward]

A key consideration of cases resulting from this precedent will be opinion, not objective fact. Therefore, these cases are likely to be longer and more expensive than comparable cases involving more fact and less "feel".

Thank you Lotus, now of IBM, for giving us the "Look and feel" copyright lawsuits -- which blazed the trail for this.

No they didn't. This has nothing to do with "look and feel" -- it's about the patentable design of a designed object. Try starting up a shop to build cars with the classic lines of a Ferrari, and see how many seconds you last.

Apple spent time and money coming up with the design of the iMac, and came up with something that looked great, so people wanted to buy it. If you copy that design, you're living off their time and money, and someone else's design vision. They should have some law -- be it copyright, design, or trademark -- to protect their work

More broadly, why does slashdot give a fuck? This isn't a software patent, or an algorithm patent. Nobody's ability to write code has been compromised. It's still possible to produce copies of the iMac which will run its software -- but they won't look like iMacs, because they won't be iMacs. There is no sense in which preventing people from ripping off designers is infringing freedom of speech.

If people have a problem with patents in general, let them make it. But please don't hijack the cause of opposition to software patents for your ideological crusade. Get the classic car enthusiasts on your side, or something. The iMac's deisgn is not information. It's not code. It doesn't want to be free.

Apple isn't the first

[maggard]

As others have noted Coca Cola long ago patented it's bottle design. Harley has done so for the growl their motorcycles make. I forget which but one of the pharmacuticals (Advil?) has patented the color of their pills. None of these are functionial improvements and thus are patentable. One can still use the Coke bottle shape, just not as a bottle. One can still growl, just your non-Harley motorcycle can't growl precisely like a Harley, and you can use whatever pill color it is anywhere else you want, just not in a pill.

So Apple now owns the idea of a tranlucent-polycarbonate-ovoid PC. I see no problem with this. While many folks are claiming Apple has patented the all-in-one PC they haven't - just their particular (and very distinctive/very unique) take on it. Should someone else come out with a glittery-squishy palmtop (the Koosh-top?) they can patent that.

Nationial Public Radio's Friday, March 05, 1999 "Talk of the Nation" program has an excellent over-view of the issue. Their program blurb reads:

In the past, only tangible things could receive a patent--things like lawnmowers or mousetraps. But in the new knowledge-based economy ideas, techniques, and even our DNA can be patented. Who wins when vital information becomes private property? Is the patent process stifling innovation or fostering it? In this hour, we'll discuss patents and the patenting process. Guests: Todd Dickinson Acting Assistant Secretary of Commerce Acting Commissioner Patents and Trademarks Arlington, Virginia Rebecca Eisenberg Professor of Law University of Michigan Ann Arbor, Michigan Seth Shulman Author, Owning the Future (Houghton Mifflin) Boston, Massachusetts.

The URL is http://search.npr.org/cf/cmn /cmnps05fm.cfm?SegID=46445 and the direct link for the audio recording (requires RealAudio) is http://www.npr.org/ramfiles/t otn/19990305.totn.02.ram (includes a Linux rant near the end.)

-- Michael

BTW - the Koosh ball is also patented

Trade dress cases have precident...

[SvnLyrBrto]

Coca Cola sucesfully sued, under the same "trade dress" laws Apple is using to go after Daewoo or eMachines or whoever, to protect the SHAPE of the Coca Cola bottle!

That's probably the precident Apple used in the case. That and the fact that the iMac knockoff artist company ADMITTED IN A PRESS RELEASE that they were going to try to ride the wave of the iMac to sucess.

The rip-off artists basically shot themselves in the foot by: a) not doing their research on trade dress law, and b) mouthing off to the press.

Also, did you know that UPS has a patent (or trademark, I forget which) on that brown color they use for everything from their trucks to their uniforms? Yup. No one else can legally use "UPS Puke Brown", without UPS's permission.

And, from the looks of some of the other posts, it appears that Slashdot has to be reminded again:

Under copyright/trademark law, if you do not aggressively defend your intellectual property, you LOSE the rights to that same property!

Apple has NO CHOISE but to go after those who would violate it's trademarks. Nor does anyone else who produces intellectual property. Not even Linus, remember when he had to put the smackdown of a couple of nare-do-wells who were going to auction off a bunch oh *linux*.* domain names for nefarious ends?

IANAL, but AFAIK, the ONLY IP that you do NOT have to aggesively defend in order to keep the rights, is a patent, which a) is a fscked up system to begin with, and b) expires much sooner than other IP anyway.

john

Can we please get one thing straight!

[Anonymous Coward]

There is way too much confusion on /. about how the intellectual property regime works. Let me clarify for all you knee-jerks the differences between copyright/patent/trademark/trade secrets: Copyright protects authors automatically (no registration required) for original works in a fixed medium (e.g. a play, a novel, source code.) Patent gives an individual (or company) a short monopoly (17 years?) during which no one can copy your patented invention unless they have your permission. The logic of patents is to encourage innovators to share their ideas with the public in exchange for temporary protection from free riders. Remember, after the patent expires, we can all use the invention freely. Trade secrets are protected by state law and include any proprietary information of commercial value that is learned during the course of employment or some other special relationship. Trademark protects the "goodwill" of a name or design. If Joe Average thinks of your company when he sees the word "Grblatz," you have trademark rights in "Grblatz." Similarly, if Joe Average thinks of Apple when he sees rounded aqua and semi-opaque plastic computers with built-in monitors and small keyboards, Apple has a trademark on the iMac design. When Apple sued Daewoo and eMachines, it was because Apple felt that those two companies were building machines that looked like the iMac in order to confuse consumers into buying the eOne or eMachine ON THE BASIS OF APPLE'S IMAC MARKETING EFFORTS. There was no design patent issue here. I am beginning to see that many people on slashdot are lashing out at the patent system based on the perceived abuses of Amazon, etc. I submit that the real problem with patent is not the system in general, but the legnth of the monopoly rights granted to a patent holder. Two decades might have been appropriate for light bulbs and typewriters, but software evolves too quickly and by the time software patents expire, the software is long since useless. The war cry for patent reform should be "1 year monopoly rights for software!" Catchy, isn't it?

Clarifications & Distinctions between real and e-

[Masem]

A lot of people are attacking apple because they feel that Apple didn't design the all-in-one computer case. Certainly, that's not the point here. Apple is trying to defend the fact that they have spent time and money to develop an unique design to computer systems, and the pc clones were obvious copies of that. No machine before the iMac had any design similar to it, so it needs to protect something that it did create. I would suspect that a suit like this will allow other computer makers with unique designs to follow up to it (for example, that Compaq business machine model that's really thin, etc). Of course, there's lots of prior outside of the iMac look for most other computer cases, so it has to be a revolutionary design.

However, with that said, this could set a dangerous precident going back to the GUI look and feel. Sure, it's too late for Microsoft or Apple or Xerox to stop GUI operating systems with the typical functionality, but let's take the Aqua theme that Apple developed for it's OS. A while back, Apple asked various theme sites to remove the Aqua clones, but based on the specific targets of the removal, these themes used the Apple or MacOS logo in the theme, which could be considered a trademark violation; Apple apparently didn't have problems with people copying the theme, just the trademarks logos.

Now sure, this case was a out-of-court settlement, no precident has been set, but this could get Apple or Microsoft or some other OS design a bit braver and take more drastic action against copy-cat clones of the OS system beyond just the standard C sure, we still have the result of the Apple/MS Look-and-Feel lawsuit that set a precident, but those can be overturned as times change.

Even beyond just the OS, what about application software? Can Netscape sue MS over look-and-feel of IE compared to NS? Can WinZip sue the countless zip clones? What about a unique feature of an application program that is then extended by others to be a common control in later application programs?

I think the key thing comes down to with something like this is that is there a difference between the design of a physical object and the design of a virtual object. As said in one of the DCMA article discussions yesterday, if someone takes a physical object, a new physical object has to be created to replace it, while one can easily take a copy of a virtual object, and still leave that virtual object for others. Because physical objects move much slower than virtual ones, is it more important to protect the designs of physical objects over virtual ones? I believe so, but there needs to be some precident to distinquish the two cases. We only have a few such precidents in place, and unless a law is passed soon regarding this, the solution will be decided by frivolous lawsuits.

There's a precedent...

[Millennium]

Coca-Cola was the first company to ever do something like this. They patented the famous "Coke bottle". That was years ago, though, and I don't seem to remember hearing about any complaints.

Do I think this one's right? I'm not sure. This isn't "look and feel." It's also not a software thing. And it's certainly a blatant violation of something, anyway. It should probably be more of a trademark violation than a patent violation, though.

The intent for eMachines and FuturePower to rip off Apple's design and profit from it was quite clear; even more blatant than Windows. For that alone they deserve a smackdown; this was nothing more than outright plagiarism. It's also about more than translucent plastic, which many Slashdotters seem to be forgetting.

But as I said, is it right? I don't know this time. I think it just might be.

"Trademark", not "Copyright" or "Patent"

[Greg Titus]

Can we please be more careful about what words are thrown around here? There is a vast difference between trademarks, copyrights and patents. The slashdot item title says "copyright", which is totally wrong. The description and a bunch of the posts here say "patent", which is also totally wrong. Everyone here is aware that these are different things, aren't they?
</rant>

This is a trademark dispute. You trademark a logo, a name, a distinctive look (like coke bottles, or UPS puke brown), et cetera. These are things that the general public notices to recognize your product. The purpose of trademark law is to keep you from purchasing some other product by mistake from a disreputable company that disguises its product as the one you actually want.

You're in a hurry, so you rush into the grocery store, grab a case of those distinctively shaped Coca-cola bottles, pay, and leave, and only when you get back to your car do you notice that you've actually bought some of my Greg's Sparkly Brown Water. (Costs the same, tastes like crap!) Without trademark law, there's nothing that Coca-cola can do about it, and I can profit off of unobservant consumers that are foolish enough to make this mistake. (Muahahahaha.)

Obviously there is a big gray area around the question: how similar do products have to be before ignorant consumers start to mistake one for the other? Beige boxes are so common that no one would think they're looking at a particular brand just because the box is square and beige. The judge who granted the preliminary injunction in this case, though, decided that Apple had done enough marketing, and the iMac look was distinctive enough, that consumers could be confused by the look of the eMachines and Daewoo boxes into thinking that they were iMacs and buy them by mistake.

This case was only about one product trying to impersonate another to take advantage of ignorant consumers, it has nothing at all to do with copyright or patent law, and nothing keeps anyone from building another all-in-one computer, or building a blue transparent computer - but trying to cash in on someone else's distinctive look is, IMHO, clearly wrong.