Jensen Harris announced that the Office 2007 Ribbon UI can be licensed.

For the last year or so, one of the questions I've been asked again and again has been: "Can I use the new Office user interface in my own product?"

I have to be honest - I'm a bit baffled at this whole thing. Note, they are not providing any common controls for the Ribbon. Rather, they are "licensing ... intellectual property rights in the UI (which cover both design and functionality) and offering a comprehensive Design Guidelines document that is a roadmap for developers implementing the UI." The license is free as long as you follow the guidelines, and is intended "[f]or those that want to build their own UI that takes advantage of our design guidelines."

The reason, as Jensen describes, is that "the new Office user interface was a huge investment by Microsoft and the resulting intellectual property belongs to Microsoft."

The next question, of course, are what rights does Microsoft actually have with the Ribbon UI. There are really two relevant IP rights here: patent and copyright. There are no published patents covering any of this (though that doesn't mean they aren't looking for one). Let's assume for a moment, though, that there are no patents at play.  Copyright cannot protect the idea of a Ribbon UI - only the specific expression. If they feel this intellectual property falls under copyright, then this license doesn't really have a lot of teeth. They're saying you can make something that looks like their copyrighted interface as long as you copy it exactly to their terms - but of course, you could always come up with a Ribbon UI as long as it was substantially different enough not to infringe.

This reminds me a lot of the recent deal between Microsoft and Novell, where Novell is paying $40M to Microsoft to license its patents and indemnify its users even while they claim there is no patent infringement. Novell now claims this is payment is for "peace of mind". (Let's ignore for a moment the implications it has with the GPL).

Is Microsoft's new IP strategy to preemptively license rights that may or may not really exist with the hope that others will buy into it? Is the threat of some general "infringement" enough to scare people into submission, even if we don't know exactly what rights they are claiming?