How far can a program&#39;s user interface be copied before it becomes copyright infringement? I want to create a program, to be specific, it's an IDE (Integrated Development Environment i.e.: a program that people can use to create programs, write code etc...) The features I want to implement, are standard for any program classified as &quot;IDE&quot;. Given that there are may IDE's around and that they all pretty much do the same thing and have very similar interfaces, I'm sure that the functionality alone cannot be copyrightable. I love the way Microsoft's Visual Studio IDE looks and feels. I'm referring to Visual Studio Desktop (not Visual Studio Code). I would like my program to look and feel the same, if not identically, at least very close. My program would have nothing in common with Microsoft's product except for how it visually looks. To be more precise, I'm interested in knowing if copying any of the following is permitted by copyright law : Program layout : where various &quot;sub panels or plugins or widgets&quot; are positioned on screen. Colors : specific shades of various colors and combinations there of, color palettes etc... Fonts, however in this case, a user might obtain a font license for personal use, and configure the program to use that specific font, but it would be nice to integrate it. Look and feel of various User Interface elements for example buttons are rectangles with text, an optional image, they have a specific width and height, a specific border size and color. Panels top bar have text on the far left, a specific fill pattern in the middle and on the right there is the &quot;pin&quot; button, and the &quot;close widget/panel&quot; button; the program editor / text editor visually highlights text with specific rectangles, and transparency patters. The question is : How far can I go in copying the user interface before it becomes copyright infringement ? I'm asking because I've seen around many programs that emulate Visual Studio's look and feel, when opening them, a normal user would struggle to tell the difference. P.S.: I assume the answer is probably no, I can't copy everything and get away with it. However, how much can be copied before it becomes copyright infringement ? Related question : Given the nature of the program I want to create, and the fact that it can be configured i.e.: its look and feel as well as graphical behavior can be changed in the settings menu; Would creating a program with a different default look and feel that can be configured manually to look exactly the same as Visual Studio be allowed (in copyright terms) ?
united-states Functionality in general is not protected by copyright, although it may in some cases be protected by a patent. As the question noted, there are many IDEs and creating another one generally similar to those is not a violation of anyone's IP rights. The &quot;look and feel&quot; of a piece of software has been held by US courts to be protected by copyright. Broderbund Software. Inc., v. Unison World, Inc., 648 F. Supp. 1127 (N.D. Cal. 1986), was a relativcly early case in which the visual display elements of a software program were held to be protected by copyright. In the decision it is said that; On the “Choose a Font” screen, no mechanical or practical factor compelled [defendant] to use those exact words (“Choose a Font”). He could have written: “Select a Font,” or “Indicate a Typeface Preference,” or “Which Type Style Do You Prefer,” or any combination of these terms. . . .The bottom line is that the designer of any program that performed the same functions as “Print Shop” had available a wide range of expression governed predominantly by artistic and not utilitarian considerations. Another relevant early case was Digital Communications Associates, Inc. v. Softklone Distributing Corp., 659 F.Supp. 449 (N.D. Ga. 1987). In this case, the Defendant &quot;oftklone intentionally set out to &quot;clone&quot; or copy the functionality and interface of the popular program Crosstalk XVI (I was a user of thwt program many years ago). The court wrote: In the instant case, however, the arrange- ment of the status screen involves consider- able stylistic creativity and authorship above and beyond the ideas embodied in the status screen. It cannot be said that the idea of the status screen, i.e., using two symbol commands to change the operations of the computer program and reflecting that fact on a screen listing the computer program’s parameters/commands with their operative values, could not have been expressed in a large variety of ways. The defendants have never contended that they could not have arranged the parameters/commands in a wide variety of patterns without hampering the operation of their program. and found copyright infringement on that basis. Section 310 of Copyrightable Authorship: What Can Be Registered by the US Copyright office, says: The U.S. Copyright Office will not consider the so-called “look and feel” of a work. Invoking a work’s “feel” is not a viable substitute for an objective analysis of the work’s fixed and creative elements. See 4 MELVILLE &amp; DAVID NIMMER, NIMMER ON Copyright § 13.03[A][1][c] (2013) (criticizing the use of “feel” as a “wholly amorphous referent” that “merely invites an abdication of analysis”). The question asks: How far can I go in copying the user interface before it becomes copyright infringement ? There is no clear bright line on this matter. The more one copies interface elements and choices from a specific source, the stronger the case for infringement is. Using elements and choices that have become common industry practice in multiple works froim multiple developers and companies is probably safe. Clearly and extensively imitating the visual appearance and interface of a single specific work of software might well be infringement. One would be wise to consult a lawyer with experience in copyright law, and specifically &quot;look and feel&quot; issues, beforign publishing such a work of software. This issue is discussed extensively in Look And Feel In Computer Software (1993) by Jack Russo &amp; Jamie Nafziger, published by Computerlaw Group LLP, which seems to be a law firm specializing in computer law. The Law of Look and Feel by Peter Lee (Professor of Law and Chancellor’s Fellow, University of California, Davis.) &amp; Madhavi Sunder (Senior Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Martin Luther King, Jr. Professor of Law, University of California, Davis.) is a 60-page law review article dealing with this topic. There is far more detail in these publications (and many others to be found on the net) than I can summarize in an SE answer. Configurable Interfaces The question asks whether the use of a configurable interface which could, but does not by default, imitate an existing interface would be infringement. I have not been able to find any case on point, or any discussion in a reliable source of this issue. Therefore, I am going to speculate. If there is a single choice between overall &quot;themes&quot; or &quot;shells&quot; and one of them imitates the interface from a protected program without permission, that would probably be legally the same as if the program shipped with that interface. It might or might not be infringement, depending on the details, as discussed above. If there are many settings, but the program is shipped with instructions advising a combination of settings that imitate another interface (or the developer or distributor provides such advice to users), that would probably be legally the same as if the program shipped in that configuration. If the developer provides a few preset configuration files which control these interface settings, and one such file results in settings that imitate another interface, that would also probably be legally the same as if the program shipped in that configuration. If there are many settings and there is no particular guidance or advice to a user on what combination to use, nor any predefined settings file, but users must discover (if they choose) a group of settings which imitate another interface, that is probably not infringement. I repeat that this section of the answer is based on general principals, but not on specific case law, nor on specific legal scholarship, and a court faced with this issue might rule otherwise. Before implementing this as a business plan, one might be wise to consult a lawyer with IP expertise.
You don't have to, but you probably want to for a couple of reasons: It's courteous, and in the spirit of open source It's someone else's work, and you're using it. The least you can probably say is &quot;thank you.&quot; It will also probably help you stay in the clear: since you're using software in binary form, where the notice isn't immediately accessible, then by providing a copy of the license, you respect that licensing term in another way. It tells your users what's up with the program Let's admit it, having the license accessible to the users tells them what's in the program and so on. It's another way of providing attribution, like I listed in the first reason above. Many apps, desktop and mobile, have a screen or panel to indicate the projects and licenses that they use. They don't have to be straight in the user's face, they can be a little button in the &quot;About&quot; screen of the program. To answer a little confusion: the binaries are still a derived form from that source code. Analyse the heading: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. The software is still there, it's just there in a different form, a compiled form. Therefore, the copyright and permission notice should probably stick around, even if it's just a file somewhere.
Written down computer code is subject to copyright. If you do not have the permission of the owner to copy it you are breaching their copyright unless your use constitutes fair use/dealing.
What copyright or trademark law permits and what Google's terms of service permit may well not be the same thing. It is not &quot;illegal&quot; to violate the ToS unless they form a binding contract, which often they will not. Even when they do, unless some cognizable harm is done, a violation of the TOS is probably not enforceable by suit or in any other way. Embedding via an Iframe simply points the browser to another site, and probably is not legally different from including a clickable link. Using CSS to alter the display might be considered to be creating a derivative work, and thus to be a copyright infringement if done without permission. Somce the linked document says: &quot;Don’t remove, obscure, or alter any of our branding, logos, or legal notices.&quot; making any such change woule violate the terms of the ToS, although this might not be an enforceable restriction. It is also IMO doubtful whether a &quot;share&quot; button constitutes part, of the &quot;branding, logos, or legal notices.&quot;
Provided you are in one of the 170+ countries signatory to the Berne Convention (the current 10 non-signatories are, exhaustively: Eritrea, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Palau, San Marino, Iran, Iraq, Ethiopia, Somalia, and South Sudan), then copyright comes into existence at the moment a work is fixed in a tangible medium, not when it is published. The initial copyright owner is the author of the work. In cases of employment, the "author" might be the natural person who authored the work, or the corporate person who employed the natural author. To clarify your thinking about registration: copyright registration is a public record of authorship (or copyright ownership). Registration does not create a copyright, but is merely a recording of the copyright that was automatically created at the moment of original authorship. Depending on circumstances and jurisdiction, Alan might have a legitimate claim to copyright on his own work. However, he will be quite hard-pressed to find a convincing theory of law that allows him to publish the unpublished copyrighted work of other people without their permission. This leaves him either to admit defeat -- he cannot possibly own the copyright of his coworkers' code, so he cannot have legally reproduced it -- or else make the baldfaced lie that the code has no other authors other than Alan himself. For your company to disprove such a claim, you may employ sworn testimony of your coworkers, you may employ code analysis to show differing coding styles (suggestive of multiple authors), or you may show code backups or version control history showing the progressive authorship of the work over time by many people. (Sure, a Git history is possible to fake, but a realistic history with feature branches, "whoops, undid the typo in the last commit" messages, etc. would lend significant weight to your company being the original authors.)
Such clauses are called "copyright assignment", "invention assignment", and/or "works for hire" clauses, partly depending on the clause's intent and wording. They're pretty common in employment contracts for software development and some creative positions. Frankly, the clauses don't actually do much, at least in the US -- copyright law already recognizes the concept of works made for hire (which belong to the employer), and claims too far beyond that are often rejected if they aren't obviously related to company business. With that said, your hypothetical programmer's painting is safe unless it depicts, say, the contents of an email from the CEO. :) Even if the clause technically entitles the employer to claim ownership, the employer has no legitimate interest in doing so. Likewise, that app created outside work is safe as long as it is created using no company resources and is unrelated to the employer's business. If the app is obviously related, that's where things get hairy.
The US does not provide copyright protection for font design. As long as you dont distribute font generating programs, that would themselves be copyrighted, you are not infringing. Your derived information is okay because it is derived from a non-copyrightable work and is therefore not a derivative work. https://law.stackexchange.com/a/25673/1340
You probably can. There are a few questions here. First, is the message protected by copyright? In general, it probably is, but there are many exceptions that might allow you to use it without permission. Unfortunately, these exceptions vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. The exceptions tend to allow the use of small excerpts of a work for various sorts of purposes that don't undermine the copyright holder's ability to profit. That leads to the second question, which is why you are using that message. If you're including it in your source code so you can test whether a message generated at run time is in fact that message, that's one thing, and it's probably okay. On the other hand, if the owner of the copyright sells a database of all its message strings, and you're compiling a similar database that you also intend to sell, that's probably not okay. A third question concerns the Firefox license terms. It's entirely possible that they allow you explicitly to do what you're considering, in which case it doesn't matter what copyright law says about it. On the other hand, Firefox is open source software, and under some open source licenses, if you incorporate any of the source code in your own product, you are required to release your product's source code under the same license. If you're not already planning to do that, you should consider carefully whether including that error message would trigger that provision (if there is one) of Firefox's open source license.