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Comment by nivla | Hacker News Reader

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/

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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.

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