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Apple Granted Trademark For Its Stores
walterbyrd sends this news from ZDNet:
"The U.S. Patent & Trademark Office approved Apple's request to trademark the design and layout of its stores last week, according to patent office records. ... Apple has requested that no store be allowed to replicate various features, including 'a clear glass storefront surrounded by a panelled facade' or an 'oblong table with stools... set below video screens flush mounted on the back wall.'"
Jobs and several Apple employees including Jef Raskin visited Xerox PARC in December 1979 to see the Xerox Alto. Xerox granted Apple engineers three days of access to the PARC facilities in return for the option to buy 100,000 shares (800,000 split-adjusted shares) of Apple at the pre-IPO price of $10 a share.[40] Jobs was immediately convinced that all future computers would use a graphical user interface (GUI), and development of a GUI began for the Apple Lisa.[41]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Inc.
Happy?
How is it new?
Apple had agreed to license certain parts of its GUI to Microsoft for use in Windows 1.0, but when Microsoft made changes in Windows 2.0 adding overlapping windows and other features found in the Macintosh GUI, Apple filed suit. Apple added additional claims to the suit when Microsoft released Windows 3.0.
...
Much of the court's ruling was based on the original licensing agreement between Apple and Microsoft for Windows 1.0, and this fact made the case more of a contractual matter than of copyright law, to the chagrin of Apple. This also meant that the court avoided a more far-reaching "look and feel copyright" precedent ruling. However, the case did establish that the analytic dissection (rather than the general "look and feel") of a user interface is vital to any copyright decision on such matters.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Microsoft_Corporation
Only people who never actual read the ruling of the case think it had to do with being unable to copyright look-and-feel.
... except the degree of copying is vastly overstated by those who always bring it up, and the compensation mysteriously never mentioned. Xerox PARC was inspiration to Apple, not a template which was slavishly imitated.
http://folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Macintosh&story=On_Xerox,_Apple_and_Progress.txt
Apple essentially paid for a one-time visit where Jobs and some engineers got to walk around a Xerox facility getting demos and taking notes. That's not enough to, ahem, xerox an OS. Not even if you end up hiring a few people away from Xerox (as Apple did). You need continuous hardware and software access to do a good job of copying. What Apple got was... a little less than that. (Amusingly enough, one Apple engineer mistakenly thought he saw the Xerox GUI doing something it actually couldn't, inspiring him to invent one of the cornerstones of Apple's early lead in GUI technology, QuickDraw regions.)
Apple copied almost nothing at the detailed level. I've seen a video of Jobs discussing how, during that visit, he completely missed what was, to him, in retrospect the most important thing about the Xerox GUI: that it was built in a dynamic object oriented language and runtime environment, Smalltalk. The Macintosh GUI was coded in a mix of Pascal and 68K assembly instead, and suffered a lot of long term problems as a result.
(Jobs went on to fix that mistake in his second try at creating a GUI computer at NeXT. His team didn't use Smalltalk as its dynamic OOP language, but it did use one heavily inspired by Smalltalk, Objective-C. Although NeXT was more or less a failure as a computer manufacturer, the software tech worked out pretty well in the long run: OS X and iOS are both direct descendants.)