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> Good heavens, no. If it were, the entire nation of Ireland would be
> guilty of infringement every time they displayed a four-leaf clover.
Bonnie Granat wrote:
> You think these are four-leaf clovers? Had they looked so to me, I would
> not have asked about it. But I don't think these are four-leaf clovers.
> Microsoft's is a variation of the window theme, and lingo apparently
> stole the internal proportions to produce a skewed design that marginally
> resembles a four-leaf clover. MS's design is clearly not intended to be a
> four-leaf clover.
Your web page asks if I (the reader) think "this" (the two logos displayed
there) constitutes copyright infringement.
I assume, perhaps incorrectly, that you are asking whether Lingo's logo is
too similar to Microsoft's OfficeOnline logo.
I do understand that Microsoft's logo is an evolutionary development of the
familiar Windows logo, thank you. I believe the Lingo logo is a stylized
perspective view of a four-leaf clover--that's certainly what it looks like
to me.
More to the point, though, note that the Lingo nodes are precisely
proportioned to create a vanishing point in the upper right corner,
creating the sense that you're looking up and to the right from the lower
left node. The nodes in Microsoft's Office logo decrease in size in a
counterclockwise direction, creating no sense of perspective. The Lingo
logo is a single color, whereas the Office logo uses Microsoft's well known
four-color theme. The Lingo nodes are "filled in"; the Office nodes are
simply outlined. The outlines of the Lingo nodes are separate, depicting
four individual entities; the Office nodes are created by the overlapping
of a single line, implying a unified entity, which is precisely their point.
You assume Lingo stole something, although I'm not sure what you mean by
"the internal proportions" given the differences I've just cited. (I can't
even imagine why a voice-over-IP company would expect to capitalize on some
similarity to an office productivity suite--if that was their goal, they'd
have been more likely to call their product OfficeTalk or something similar.)
By contrast, I assume Lingo paid someone to design a logo they liked, and
that any similarity is in the eye of the beholder--it happens.
Finally, I never said *both* logos are four-leaf clovers. I meant that
there's no infringement because the Lingo logo looks no more like the
Office logo than would any other stylized representation of a four-leaf clover.
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