British Court Issues Bizarre Copyright Ruling 418
dipfan writes "In a re-run of the Lotus v Borland case that went to the US Supreme Court, the High Court in London has allowed a copyright infringement battle between two rival airline booking programs to go to trial, despite agreement by all sides that the two programs are written in different code. The airline Easyjet is being sued by software house Navitaire, creators of an online booking system called Openres, over Easyjet's booking system named eRes, developed by Bulletproof Technologies of California. Openres was written in Cobol, while eRes was written in Visual Basic, and the programs are also different in structure.
But, according to the FT article: 'Parallels had been drawn between appropriating the "functional structure" of a computer system and commandeering the plot of a book, the judge noted.' If Navitaire wins, then any program that works like another program - even if written in different code - could be vulnerable. What happened to the principle that you can't copyright an idea? Bulletproof is counter-suing
Navitaire in the district of Utah."
Maybe not so cut-and-dried... (Score:5, Informative)
Okay, so the case has only been declared tryable, not that there was infringement. And though I don't agree that "studying closely" is an issue, I'm not sure we can say that the fact that they're written in a different language automatically disqualifies it from an IP violation.
If I take your Fortran application, use g77 to convert it to C++, change your name to mine and search-and-replace a few things, wouldn't I still be violating your IP?
Ah, yes... it's copyright case... but, Henry Potter and the Room of Mysteries, anyone?
Re:English suck (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Code choice is irrelevant (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Well... (Score:3, Informative)
Mozilla was Netscape's mascot - The Mosaic Killer
Re:Copyrighting Ideas--A Personal Example (Score:3, Informative)
I personally experienced that in a big way. A little over two years ago I set out write the first-ever, book-length chronology of Tolkien's complex Lord of the Rings. Would it be useful? Many Tolkien fans have told me it is. Is it legal? Well that depends not on the law, which applies to the entire country, on which federal court circuit you happen to reside in and which judge you get.
The Second Circuit (New York) is nasty. With perhaps one marvelous exception, the judges seem to be owned, lock, stock and barrel, by the holders of lucrative copyrights. The district's most recent judicial disaster (there are others) was a series of much criticized 1998 decisions centering on Castle Rock and and book called the Seinfeld Aptitude Test. Though their arguments were muddled (a court in another circuit has termed them "frivilous"--a major insult), the courts seem to be claiming that only the copyright holder can do reference works on fictional works. Tolkien, in my case, "owned" his literary creation to the extent people like me couldn't describe it, we could only comment on it as a piece of literature.
Legally, that's nonsense. The law lists the sorts of derivative works a copyright holder owns and none come close to being a reference or guide to some work of fiction. In fact, there are reference works and guides to fiction (i.e. operas) reaching back into the 19th century.
But that is the law, at least for now and at least in the Second Circuit. As a result, many publisher are steering away from publishing on modern fiction altogether. The legal counsel at one university press told me they were not publishing anything on contemporary fiction to avoid lawsuits they could not afford.
In my case, the Tolkien literary estate, attempting to build on those bad Second Circuit decisions, took me to court for copyright infringement in the Ninth Circuit (Seattle). Since I'm a small one-Mac publisher, they probably thought they had a weak defendant who would make it easy to spread those bad decisions beyond the Second. (In four years, no other court had accepting the reasoning in Castle Rock.)
Unfortunately for them, I'm stubborn and fought back, repersenting myself (pro se) for most of the lawsuit. In the end, my arguments for fair use proved even stronger than I had initially thought and, seeing that, the Tolkien estate lawyers wrote the judge just before summary judgment, expressing a willingness to settle out of court. The judge, for her part, made sure they knew they didn't stand a chance of winning by dismissing their lawsuit "with prejudice" this past January. We concluded an out-of-court settlement a few months ago and the book, Untangling Tolkien, should be coming out this week or next. It's already listed on Barnesandnoble.com.
In a sense, I "won" in part because: 1. Unlike most publishers, I'm in Seattle (9th) rather than NYC (2nd). 2. I'm so poor, their initial demand for $750,000 damages did not scare me in the slightest. 3. I've read enough in law I could do fairly well defending myself. If I hadn't, I'd now be burdened with perhaps $80,000 in legal fees. 4. I've very stubborn. 5. Overconfident, they made a number of critical blunders. 6. I had a smart judge, one unlikely to be snowed by their many hundreds of pages of bogus claims. (Their technique for manufacturing "plagarism" was so carefully refined, it had me taking from an obscure Tolkien book I'd never seen.)
But it is important to remember that there was no way I could be assured in advance that what I was doing was, beyond a doubt, legal. I had the letter of law and the weight of law before 1998 on my side as well as a number of post-1998 decisions going contrary to
Misunderstanding: Copyrights and Patents (Score:3, Informative)
It is worthwhile to allow exlusivity on expression and implementation; this encourages development of better ways of saying things and better ways of doing things. To allow exlusivity on ideas themselves inhibits that.
People seem to forget this, and sue someone for reimplementing an old idea, or rewriting and old thought. So you get some idiot going to court because some other knucklehead "stole" his idea, even though it was implemented differently and completely independently.
Yes, one should be able to patent a particular design of a device that turns piss into beer. At the same time, he should not be able to patent the act of turning of piss into beer.
However, this all becomes blurred when you consider a process or an algorithm; is it a form of expressing an idea ("I just wrote some code that turns piss into beer!"), a form of implementing the idea ("Let's do this to turn piss into beer!"), or is it the idea itself ("Let's turn piss into beer!")? If copyright only is filed, then only the content of the code or the draftsman's plan is protected. If a patent is filed, then the means by which the end is reached is protected, but the end itself is not. The idea process should not, under any circumstances, be protected. If the end product is tangible (beer, or the format of an airline ticket), yes, that should be patentable. If the end product is an idea (a value, or the data contained in an airline ticket), that should not be patentable.
US has the same law, Jaslow case. (Score:4, Informative)
Wrong poindexter (Score:1, Informative)
1. Novell gave the functional ideas to Open Group, not SCO.
2. HP have equivalent rights to the 64 bit version of Sys V source, to whatever rights SCO have in the 32 bit version of Sys V source.
3. The ownership of "functional ideas", whoever they are obtained by, are already impaired. All UNIX versions up to 32V, and possibly System III (etc), are probably public domain thanks to previous court rulings in USL vs BSDI.
4. As ALL versions of AT&T code since the late 70s (at least), are contaminated with unattributed BSD code, there is a very solid unclean hands to defense to any copyright infringement suit.
5. Many of the functional ideas in SCO's code, belong to BSD (they just not attributed in the source, in violation of BSD license). Whatever copyright SCO has, doesn't apply to them.
6. Caldera licensed use of the functional ideas up to fairly recent versions, by BSDing old source code.
So in short, SCO's copyright claim to UNIX code is weak. Extending it to any of the functional ideas behind UNIX would be even weaker.
Re:Copyrighting and Idea (Score:3, Informative)
Case in point: Arthur Author writes a book. Fred Filmmaker makes a movie based on Arthur's book. Are they the same expression of the idea? Very few people would say they are, but copyright law says they are different since each work gets its own copyright. But, copyright law also says Fred has to get Arthur's permission before he makes the film. Therefore, it's the idea which is protected, not just the expression of the idea.
As soon as copyrights started covering derivative works, the whole concept of protecting the expression of the idea went out the window.