I was particularly interested in the section of our textbook that went over copyright and trademark laws as they apply to iPhone applicatons. In our required Digital Media Law class last quarter, we went over copyright and trademark law as well. I recognized the importance of this type of law when working in the field of digital media and realized how little I knew about it while in that class. While the class gave me a solid understanding of how and when creative works are protected by copyright, we focused more on artistic creations such as music, photographs, art pieces and literary works. Our reading intrigued me because it showed that an iPhone application is a great example of a creation that is a mix between creative and “uncreative” works, which are not covered by copyright. According to the reading, facts, ideas, systems or methods are not protected. This means that the physical appearance of an app may be protected, but the concept of the application is not. This is clearly reflected in the iPhone app store, where it’s common to find several applications that serve the same function. It is also relevant to our class project, as many of our ideas for new iPhone app share some functions with existing iPhone apps, yet build on those concepts. It would be interesting to see how many, if any, lawsuits have been filed involving smart phone applications. As such a small percentage of developers make a significant amount of money off of these applications, it’s likely not worth a company to sue another over copyright infringement as there usually isn’t a lot of profit made.
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2 Responses to “Reading Reflection: Copyright and iPhone Apps”
- 1 Trackback on July 30, 2010 at 10:32 pm
What you want to explore is the difference between copyright and trademarks and patents. Patents are usually where businesses file law suits against one another for infringement. Amazon was able to patent its “one click” business process, which set a lot of teeth to gnashing.
I don’t think business processes should be patentable, but they are currently considered the expression of an idea. Last month, the US Supreme Court agreed, at least in part, in ruling that a way of hedging commodity risk could not be patented “because it was an abstract idea.” But it also said this didn’t mean no business process could have a patent.