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

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.