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Comment by ams6110 | Hacker News Reader

Putting aside whether Microsoft’s design was actually new and not obvious in 2006 (when Microsoft filed its application)

UI sliders were certainly not novel in 2006. And I'd be surprised if Corel did anything other than use the stock slider in Microsoft's UI library. Maybe they implemented their own and it looks too much like Microsoft's?

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from the actual lawsuit, it is more about corel creating a "Microsoft word mode" to mimic the UI/style of MS Word.

this slider is just part of it.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2006/11/21/licensing...

edit: fixed link, thank commenter below for identifying error

Your link appears to be missing a hyphen--the post is available at http://blogs.msdn.com/b/jensenh/archive/2006/11/21/licensing...

Keeping aside the stupidity of the patent, it does seems like Coral made their Wordperfect look a lot similar to Microsoft Word.[1][2]

[1] http://www.wordperfect.com/static/img/content/products/wp_ho...

[2] http://www.wordperfect.com/us/product/corel-office-software/

The Corel tools literally have a "Microsoft <product> mode" which changes the UI to look almost identical to the equivalent Microsoft product. They aren't hiding the fact that the design is taken from Microsoft. Take a look at the screenshots from the complaint and if you hide the name title bar, you'll have a hard time picking out which one is from Microsoft and which is from Corel.

https://www.eff.org/files/2015/12/28/microsoft_v_corel_-_com...

Design patents cannot cover functional aspects, and mimicking another product for usability (not aesthetics) sounds pretty darn functional to me. Especially in the realm of word processors where there's such a lopsided market.

And the lawsuit is all about copying the aesthetics, not the functional aspects. In UIs, usability is more about the aesthetics, since it is all about the best way of presenting the underlying functionality, not the functionality itself. I cannot think of a valid reason why a product should be able to free-ride on the popularity of its competitor. Just because a "market is lopsided" does not seem like it.

Because OS companies like Microsoft and Apple set standards for how applications built for their OS should look-and-feel, and tell developers to make them consistent?

That may actually make a convincing legal argument. I believe the appropriate doctrine would be "estoppel".

What I was trying to say is that maybe Corel could argue that they can't be infringing a design patent for copying what MS calls aesthetic, when it's actually functional. In other words, they would say they were copying necessary functional aspects for user interoperability, so those aspects cannot be claimed to be aesthetic and covered by a design patent.

Interesting link. One of the core ideas behind Windows' success back in the day (when almost every program implemented its own unique GUI system and they were very inconsistent) was that it provided reusable UI components and Microsoft said that all developers should use their standard design, GUI components, and keyboard shortcuts to provide consistent interfaces for Windows programs. Seems rather hostile that Microsoft would now be suing someone for doing exactly what they always told everyone to do (especially considering that other developers using their UIs is a significant part of what made Microsoft itself so successful).

I guess the fact that they made it available to anyone not directly competing with their office suite is something. But the whole "Do what I tell you to do!" "Ok, I will." "Now you're in trouble for doing that!" routine still seems obnoxious.

Aren't they taking a page from Apple's playbook here? "You can do mostly whatever, as long as you don't duplicate functionality of our existing - or planned applications; in the latter case we'll retroactively pull you from the market."

> UI sliders were certainly not novel in 2006.

The patents at issue are design patents, not utility patents (what we know of as inventions).

Sliders as functional UI devices weren't novel, but the particular design at issue was unique to Microsoft when they filed for their design patent.

Weren't there exactly such sliders in Photoshop, like 5-10 years earlier?

Yep, at least since Photoshop 3 (which runs just fine on Win7 btw). Macromedia Dreamweaver (now Adobe) had a Ribbon (toolbar with tabs) many years before Microsoft Office 2007 too, nevertheless Microsoft filed patents for it.

If you can show that those UI controls looked exactly like the designs in these patents, you may have found invalidating prior art.

I've been using Photoshop since it's release. I use it daily and I have to be honest and say that I don't recall sliders looking like that, ever. Can you provide an illustration?

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