UI Controls Copyright

Posted by user3692481 on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by user3692481
Published on 2014-05-30T19:05:43Z Indexed on 2014/05/30 21:56 UTC
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Filed under:

legal

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copyright

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user-interface

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osx

I'm developing a cross-platform computer software. It will run on Windows and Mac OS X. For user experience reasons, I want it to have the same graphic on both platforms. I really like the Mac OS UI controls and I'd love to see them on the Windows version too.

My question is: is it legal to "copy" UI components? I'm not going to copy icons or reproduce an existing Apple software. I would only "copy" some standard UI components such as Buttons, Progressbars, TreeView, ListView etc.

You can see them here:

IMHO, they should not be copyrighted for two reasons:

They are implicitly used by any Mac OS software
There are a lot of Apps (for Windows and even Web-Apps) that are "inspired by" the Mac graphic.

Am I right?

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