Computer Programs, User Interfaces, and Section 102(b) of the Copyright Act of 1976: A Critique of Lotus v. Paperback

The Supreme Court\u27s landmark ruling Lotus Development Corp vs Paperback Software International is critiqued. The ruling did not resolve the issue of whether copyright law protects user interfaces

It Walks Like a Duck, Talks Like a Duck, . . . But Is It a Duck? Making Sense of Substantial Similarity Law as It Applies to User Interfaces

This Comment recommends how courts should apply the substantial similarity analysis to user interfaces. Specifically, this Comment (1) delineates the state of the law in the Ninth Circuit and explains how the recent changes should be interpreted with respect to user interfaces; (2) establishes an analytic framework for evaluating proposed substantial similarity tests through the enumeration of a set of goals specific to user interfaces; and (3) uses this analytic framework to evaluate and endorse a test that applies traditional copyright doctrine to a logical and consistent manner

It Walks Like a Duck, Talks Like a Duck, . . . But Is It a Duck? Making Sense of Substantial Similarity Law as It Applies to User Interfaces

This Comment recommends how courts should apply the substantial similarity analysis to user interfaces. Specifically, this Comment (1) delineates the state of the law in the Ninth Circuit and explains how the recent changes should be interpreted with respect to user interfaces; (2) establishes an analytic framework for evaluating proposed substantial similarity tests through the enumeration of a set of goals specific to user interfaces; and (3) uses this analytic framework to evaluate and endorse a test that applies traditional copyright doctrine to a logical and consistent manner

Pervasive Technologies and Support for Independent Living

A broad range of pervasive technologies are used in many domains, including healthcare: however, there appears to be little work examining the role of such technologies in the home, or the different wants and needs of elderly users. Additionally, there exist ethical issues surrounding the use of highly personal healthcare-related data, and interface issues centred on the novelty of the technologies and the disabilities experienced by the users. This report examines these areas, before considering the ways in which they might come together to help support independent-living users with disabilities which may be age-related

Thermal Windows: How Well-Insulated Are Software Developers from Copying of Their Programs\u27 Visual Displays

Throughout the relatively short history of the computer industry, many disputes have arisen over unauthorized copying of computer programs. However, in most of the earlier cases, the disputed copyright protected the actual program code as a literary work rather than the visual display of the program as an artistic work. In Apple Computer,Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals confronted an alleged copyright violation resulting from copied visual displays. Because the disputed copyright protected the displays as artistic works rather than the program code as a literary work, the court was forced to apply established principles in copyright law to an area in which the law is not completely clear

PrivacEye: Privacy-Preserving Head-Mounted Eye Tracking Using Egocentric Scene Image and Eye Movement Features

Eyewear devices, such as augmented reality displays, increasingly integrate eye tracking but the first-person camera required to map a user's gaze to the visual scene can pose a significant threat to user and bystander privacy. We present PrivacEye, a method to detect privacy-sensitive everyday situations and automatically enable and disable the eye tracker's first-person camera using a mechanical shutter. To close the shutter in privacy-sensitive situations, the method uses a deep representation of the first-person video combined with rich features that encode users' eye movements. To open the shutter without visual input, PrivacEye detects changes in users' eye movements alone to gauge changes in the "privacy level" of the current situation. We evaluate our method on a first-person video dataset recorded in daily life situations of 17 participants, annotated by themselves for privacy sensitivity, and show that our method is effective in preserving privacy in this challenging setting.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figures, supplementary materia

Copyrighting Experiences: How Copyright Law Applies to Virtual Reality Programs

This note will attempt to shed light on the question of what kind of protection copyright law affords VR experiences. Part II discusses the nature of VR experiences and their implementation through specifically tailored VR technology. Part III provides an overview of copyright protection, its limitations, and specifically the history of the copyrightability of computer programs. Parts IV and V outline case law relevant to the discussion of the copyrightability of different types of VR experiences and how that case law similarly or dissimilarly apply to the protection of VR experiences. Part IV focuses on protecting VR experiences as a literary work, through its underlying code and Part V will focus on protecting VR experiences as audiovisual works, through its visual outputs. Part VI discusses a potential avenue for obtaining copyright protection through the useful article doctrine, while avoiding some of the major roadblocks to copyright protection that discussed in the previous sections. Finally, Part VII provides a summary and conclusion of the current state of protection for the elements which make up VR experiences as well as suggestions for how VR developers may want to proceed in order to obtain the largest scope of protection for their works