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Subject:Re: Graphics copyrights From:John Russell <JRussell -at- DATAWARE -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 8 Oct 1996 12:10:00 -0400
>. Caution: You can, however, _trademark_ an appearance. The
>. Microsoft logo's typographic characteristics would prevent
>. you from creating a logo for "Microhard" that looked too
>. similar. The legal touchstone: are you trying to make
>. people think that your product is really Microsoft's, or
>. are you just striving for compatibility?
Interesting question. I believe what management wants is to integrate
our help file (and accompanying VBX controls) so smoothly with
Microsoft's that they look, act, feel like they are Microsoft's. In
essence, I believe that management wants our customers to not be able to
tell the difference between use of our VBX controls and Microsoft's.
For the help file, the only really distinguishing difference in the
format and presentation of the information concerns the changes I made
to the Contents screen, and a few other minor/barely noticeable
differences in the formatting of the text (for instance, I used Arial
because I can not seem to access MS Sans Serif in Word 6).
In short, my help file looks identical to Microsoft's VB 4.0 help. The
graphic issue came up because in order to make my Contents page look
like their Contents page, I realized that their Contents page was a
single graphic and I thus duplicated the graphic to produce the same
effect.
While I believe I am safe with the format and layout of the information
in the help file, the Contents screen graphic started me thinking.
How is "a graphic" defined (by copyright law or otherwise)? How are
"graphics" protected by copyright law?
Is a graphic a file? an image? a picture? series of pictures? If a
"graphic" is defined in terms of "file" then I'm even more curious about
what I've done.
How would *YOU* define "a graphic"?
Cheers,
--
kjr
jrussell -at- dataware -dot- com
K. John Russell
Dataware Technologies, Inc
5 Computer Drive South
Albany, New York 12205
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