I have been asked to clone some existing software for a company. Basically its an old 16 bit DOS console app, which was supplied free of charge in I believe the late 80's. Having replaced the machine that needs to run it with a box running Win7 x64 they can't get it to work. It crashes every couple of minutes under DOSbox.
The company that supplied it appears to no longer exist – if they did the company asking me to do this would almost certainly know about it. Its undetermined whether they have gone entirely or are just trading under a different name. If the latter they seem to have withdrawn from the market related to this product (because again, niche area, we should know about everyone there).
What is the status to this with regards to copyright etc.? The main concern for the company involved is they want an identical interface to what they already have so I would have to clone this entirely. Having no source code / indication of the underlying mechanisms these would be written from scratch.
Is an interface covered by copyright? / Does that still hold 30 years later? What is the assumed license when none at all is provided?
Under UK law would I be under any serious risk were I to take on the project? How would this pan out if I then decided to sell the software on to other companies?
Best Answer
Legal questions are best asked of someone familiar with the ins and outs of the various aspects of intellectual property law in your jurisdiction. Asking random people on the internet is not legal advice and shouldn't be construed as legal advice. Everything that I'm going to say below is based on the US understanding of legal issues by a layman - the US because thats were most of the software court cases have been. You're in the UK - talk with a local legal expert.
Copyright protects the specifics works. The actual source code. The graphics resources used in creating the application. The music that the app plays. The text in the help pages in the app.
The look and feel of an an application sits on some confusing ground. Icons can be copyrighted. In Lotus vs Borland the menu was at issue. The outcome of the case was that the implementation is subject to copyright, and the icons in a menu may be copyrighted, but the operations and mechanics are not copyrightable.
Neither are they patentable (one might get a design patent on various aspects of how things look... but thats very unlikely for an old 16 bit DOS app). And they aren't able to be trademarked either (one might be able to trademark specific words in the menu such as "About Frobnostic..." where Frobnostic is the trademarked name of the app).
You are starting out from scratch, doing a clean room design (or nearly so). You are probably in the clear.