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MetaLab Accuses Mozilla of Ripping Off UI Elements In Mockups
CWmike writes "Canadian interface design firm MetaLab has accused Mozilla of stealing user interface elements for a development tool in the browser maker's Jetpack project, which aims to simplify add-on making. MetaLab leveled the charges on Tuesday when the 11-person firm's founder, Andrew Wilkinson, blogged about the similarities between his company's designs and those posted by Mozilla for FlightDeck, a Jetpack editor. 'What they did was pretty ridiculous,' Wilkinson said on Thursday. 'There's a difference between inspiration versus ripping something off,' he said. 'The measurements of the graphic elements [Mozilla took from us] were the exact same, the very same pixels. When someone takes your images from the server hosting them, that's crossing the line.' Mozilla apologized to MetaLab on Wednesday, saying in a blog post, 'While the design direction being implemented does not utilize these design elements, we inadvertently included the early mockups in our blog post and video announcing the next phase of development for the Jetpack SDK ... We sincerely apologize to MetaLab for incorporating design elements from their web site in our early mockups and for posting them publicly without proper attribution.'" Alexander Limi of the Firefox User Experience Team points out that MetaLab has accepted the apology, too — worth bearing in mind.
Without stealing of ideas, we wouldn't have Open Office which implemented feature-for-feature what Microsoft Office has. Without stealing, we wouldn't have KDE and Gnome with implemented many features from Windows and OS X. How could open source survive without it? :)
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Company does something wrong.
Company apologizes.
Accuser accepts apology.
Slow news day?
The summary alludes to this, but just in case (since 90% of people who comment probably won't read past the headline):
R.Mo
So, a company decided to take shortcuts in creating a mockup of a project still in early development, and is being blasted because of it? Seriously, this was nowhere near a final release or even a beta release. It was a mockup, designed solely to get across an idea of what the final product interface would look like. Tasking an art team to create all-new icons and artwork is generally counter to the idea of the quick-and-dirty nature of mockups.
Jetpack is pretty much an attempt at making firefox extensions greasemonkey scripts that hold no actual application power. They were talking of removing normal extension support for that fake sugary stuff. Plus the idea that normal people will be making quick extensions is just ridiculous. Making a normal ff extension is not that hard, it's all quite documented and you can take any simple extension as base template if scared...
Here is what it looks like now: http://gallery.ymkatz.net/mozilla%20jetpack.png
Lotus 123, Visicalc, WordPerfect, ... I guess you can give MS PowerPoint.
I harvested a background out of sheer laziness. I took it from Ford.com! LOL!
The story shows up with the maple leaf icon. It's like just another whining of those guys up north playing make-belief country.
Seriously, there are only a few ways you can make a decent UI that is familiar. Sharing user interfaces is a -good thing- when it comes down to it, the more familiar an application is, the easier it is to use. Imagine if every single program had a radically different UI. You opened up Firefox and it looked nothing like IE, which looked nothing like Opera which looked nothing like Chrome, if this happened probably everyone would still be using Mosaic. The more UIs borrow from one another, the easier they are to use and the better the UI becomes.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
MetaLab didn't need to make a big deal about this. they could of reported it to Mozilla if it were concerned. It's obvious MetaLab posted the blog entry to get attention. Basically advertising: even negative attention is good for them. I would wager hardly anyone on Slashdot even knew MetaLab's name prior to this article. Now that this article has hit news, everyone who read it knows they could go to MetaLab to get a quote for UI design....
Obviously this whole incident will do a lot of good for MetaLab, in the way of free advertising, they will probably profit handsomely from this fiasco.
While Mozilla have used their imagery, and there is obvious similarity, they haven't included it in a user interface, they have combined the work with work of their own to express some ideas about how their final interface could look like.
I would think it's unlikely that their final design would look at all like the mockup. First mockup very rarely reflects what the final product will be.
Basically, while, the imagery Mozilla posted that had some renditions including some MetaLab design elements, it was of zero commercial value, used in the creative process.
And although a derivative work, probably fair use, providing they had only used it in the mockup.
I just wanted to note that apparently Mozilla didn't remove anything from MetLab's servers; all data was intact and unharmed. Things were copied, yes, but that didn't prevent MetLab from continuing to use their UI elements, unlike what their accusations make it sound like (last time I had my car stolen, I couldn't drive it until I got it back, but maybe MetLab inhabits a different dimension than me).
What does it matter if it was a mockup or the real thing? Last I checked using "UI elements" was not protected by copyright or patents. This is the same as the Microsoft and Apple "Look-and-feel" lawsuit from last century. The original complaint was about mockups using straight copied images which could be a copyright infraction but the final product even if it looked nearly identical would be non-infringing. KDE and GNOME both have UI themes that completely rip off various versions of Windows and MacOS. The design (and arts in general) community is so deeply incestuous that to complain about this sort of thing just makes you look like a punk. I looked at their "UI elements"I that Google ripped off and it is absolutely nothing special that hasn't been done before. With a color change and slight adjustment there would be no reasonable grounds for claims of infringement.
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CINC, 4th Penguin Legion
yes thats right, slashdot is as bad as fox news.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Thr's a diffrnce btwn bing drivative and bing an attmpt at a 1:1 copy.
I disagr.
Chrs,
--^x
Fuck Canada.
yes thats right, slashdot is as bad as fox news.
I'm pretty sure Slashdot makes no claim toward being a fair and balanced news source with regard to these issues...
X slights Y, apologizes. Y accepts apology. Isn't it a rather depressing thought that this kind of upright behaviour apparently is unusual enough that it makes news?
Look what they try to copy. There aren't much new designs here, or have been on the Web for quite a while now.
I hadn't heard of MetaLab before. Now, I have.
Mission accomplished.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
OpenBSD wanker Theo achievements that fucking surprise, Own agenda - give AAl serversM. Coming prima donnas to
Most people don't understand how stuff work. Just learn where is a icon, and learn to press it, and press again on other icon with other name... don't learn to use stuff, learn to run these "small scripts". If you moves that icon, you break his "script", if you changes the icon too much, or removes it, the user become lost.
So to have user work with your stuff ( a Office tools program, or a Desktop ) you have to completelly copy what the users have learn. This is some menus and icons in a Office program, and the taskbar and desktop icons and rightclick options in a Desktop.
Is not that opensource is cloning closed source, is that for opensource to success with the current crop of users, have to emulate how some closed source apps work. For linux to become succesfull has to clone how a UNIX work. For Gnome to work succesfull has to clone how Windows 95 taskbar work.
Thats now how devs want to build his stuff, but is the only succesfull and popular way. There are less succesfull and unpopular ways, like for a desktop work in "weird" ways, like Windowmaker...
FOSS can be original, but is a bad trait that affect negativelly the popularity of the products.
-Woof woof woof!
"They told me that that the team who put together the blog post and video was unaware of the similarities at the time of inclusion."
Unaware? Bullshit. That was a copy/paste job. Every pixel is identical.
...What an unusual story of reasonable, fair minded business professionals that seem ethical, responsive, and willing to admit or forgive a mistake. This is news, these days.
I am dumbfounded at how many times the word "steal" is used in these replies. Truly the culture thieves (Disney, RIAA, MPAA, etc.) have already won.
Modern copyright is theft of culture from everyone and it retards the progress of the useful arts and sciences.
This is GUI stuff. I think it's a good idea to standardize on things. Particularly icons. Having many different versions of an icon for doing the same thing is stupid. It just makes them all unrecognizable and useless. Look at a car dash. How many people know what the buttons and knobs do by looking at the latest version of their icons? I'm not sure how to resolve the "it's my idea" part.