[admanimal]

Today I received a copyright infringement notice from an attorney of the McGraw-Hill Corporation, publishers of the Business Week News Widget. They claimed that my ESPN and Wired widgets were in violation of their copyrights because

a) they look similar to the Business Week Widget and
b) I took a significant amount of code directly from the BW Widget.

Clearly my widgets' appearance were inspired by the Business Week widget, although I created all of the graphics and html used in my widgets from scratch. If this constitutes a copyright infringement, then I guess they were right. B) is completely false. Yes, there are large portions of code that are nearly identical in both my widgets and the Business Week widget; that's because this code actually originated from Apple's example widgets. If I was so interested in stealing their code, why would I write a completely new RSS reading plugin from scratch rather than just use their existing javascript RSS reader? Oh well. I just made these things for fun, so I'm not going to fight this and risk being sued. I just wanted to give everyone else a heads up so you can avoid this problem yourselves, which I guess means not making a widget that displays news headlines, has a search bar, or uses any HTML or javascript.

[andrethegiant]

yikes! that almost happened to me, the website i got my info from didn't like it that much because then people didn't see and click on their ads. but we wrote them a letter and they understood. try writing a letter, it works. what do they want you to do though, stop making widgets, or what?

[admanimal]

They made me remove the two widgets from my web site and any other site I had submitted them to.

[johnr]

[jonlink]

seriously, dont just roll over, it's bad for all of us if companies think they can push widget developers around. like you said you were doing it for fun, so it isn't like you are making money.

i agree with johnr, redesign the look if you are that afraid, but really there is no law against things looking similar. so long as you didn't take any of their artwork or copy their logo you are fine. my guess is they do *not* have a legal leg to stand on and are just hoping to intimidate you.

[admanimal]

Thanks for your support guys. While it is certainly tempting to fight back, as in fact what I think is actually happening is McGraw-Hill claiming that Apple's copyrighted (example) code is their own, I just don't have the time to go through this just to prove an albeit important point.

[BagOfHammers]

Some people think they own everything, don't they? It sounds to me like McGraw-Hill is demonstrating their lack of knowledge on this one - I don't know if they care about their image but they made themselves look unreasonable, unknowledgeable, and needlessly aggressive simultaneously. Hopefully they would back down if you send a letter calmly explaining what you did here, because suing over perfectly legitimate widgets is just plain low. Sad.

[johnr]

You may want to make Apple aware of the situtuaion. They may be able to prevent this type of thing in the future.

Johnr

[wraithe]

Well, I can understand not wanting to roll over, and yet also not wanting to get into a slugging contest with a buncha corporate lawyer types. Meet them halfway:

a: You agree to change the graphics to no longer resemble their graphics. Might I be so bold as to suggest Puke-pink and Neon green. (Provide a preference to change it back if you want to live on danger money)

b: You are quite interested in their claim to ownership of the code, in fact, you have forwarded the code of their widget AND a copy of their letter to Apple's Legal Department. (Say hi the Apple's lawyers, boys!) I'm sure Apple will be understanding of McGraw attempting to claim ownership of THEIR code.

Hope this helps, or at least gave you a chuckle. It's likely what I'd do, but I'm kinda ornery by nature.

[jonlink]

you really should at least do B