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."
Pattents and Copyrights (Score:5, Interesting)
"Commandeering the plot of a book?" (Score:2, Interesting)
Second, if you couldn't "commandeer" plots, I doubt anybody would be writing any books these days.
Hmm (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:"Commandeering the plot of a book?" (Score:5, Interesting)
Consider the original COBOL work probably lived on some big iron, and like our legacy COBOL systems, shipped with the code.
Maybe Easyjet (or some co-company) was once a licensee of the original work. Rather than pay for an upgrade, they hire a handful of geeks to port it to VB.
There's infringement there - it's not an original work.
It's more like taking a french novel, translating it to english, and slapping your name on it.
Or taking some GPL project, running it through a C to (whatever language) translator, and selling it as your own.
The judge merely allowed them their day in court, which sounds like the right decision to me.
Re:You got sued, yay! (Score:5, Interesting)
That's actually a pretty good analogy.
The reason all rockets, missiles, spears and yes, penises (penii?), look functionally similar is because they all do pretty much the same thing: they penetrate some medium, and streamlining is a necessity. So why should it be surprising that two reservation systems, written in different code, should be functionally similar? (I would be surprised if they were not.) Unless the plaintiff can show proof that the defendant was actually eating off their plate, then the case should be thrown out.
And what if Boeing sued Lockheed because it built planes that were "functionally similar," in that its planes had swept-back wings and smooth cylindrical fuselages? It'd get laughed out of court.
Heck, I seem to recall that calculus mathematics was developed independently at roughly the same time. This kind of thing just happens, people. Get over it.
Re:so! The world is going mad (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Why is this bizarre? (Score:5, Interesting)
Data East released "Fighters History", an obvious clone of the wildly popular Street Fighter II. It had similar characters with similar moves...
Capcom lost, and the floodgates opened for folks like SNK and Sammy to inundate us with SFII clones, each one more derivative of the last!
This case, however, could be more than just "look and feel". If it turns out that Easyjet once licensed the original COBOL application (and big iron apps like that tend to ship with code), and decided to port rather than continuing to pay licensing fees...
Interesting dilemma (Score:5, Interesting)
And that's a bit of a problem; lawsuits like the one described in the story are considered pretty normal in the music industry; if OpenOffice and MSOffice both were songs, OpenOffice would probably have to pay some kind of fee to MSOffice for using their intellectual property and we'd all consider that normal...
Anyway... It'd be interesting to hear what other people think about this because to me it is a fundamental problem with how I view the whole copyright/patent/freespeech-discussion.
One solution would be to consider the sourcecode a work of art and the resulting binary an apparatus but that would be ridiculous since it would introduce a huge legal difference between scripts and binaries which would be great to feed a huge discussion but clearly is not a practical solution. So maybe the question we (or at least I) should ask ourselves first, is "What exactly are the differences between sourcecode and compiled sourcecode from a moral and IP point of view?"
Re:Copyrighting and Idea (Score:5, Interesting)
Romeo and Juliet = Tristan und Isolde
Midsummers Nights Dream = Chaucer, Ovid and other folk tales
Hamlet = based on a 12th century tale by Saxo Grammaticus
There are some that say that Shakespeare even bordered on plagiarism.
Microsoft best avoid England... (Score:2, Interesting)
Does MSN + Messenger remind you of anything? I'm sure AOL feels that the plot of their book was comandeered and wouldn't mind thwacking MS again to pay off more of their debt.
How about
I'm sure there are even less generic examples that are just not occuring to me at the moment.
I'm confused. (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't see how Utah comes into play here. Unless they think that since SCO can get away with frivolous suits in Utah, then everybody can.
Lotus vs. Borland (Score:3, Interesting)
Finally, some good words for UTAH! (Score:3, Interesting)
Navitairo = SCO Bulletproof = IBM
Navitairo files suit in London. Bulletproof files counter-suit in Utah.
Now how'd that happen? Utah courts are suddenly making sense?
Not a good analogy (Score:2, Interesting)
I've worked with people who could come up with fundamentally the same two pieces of software because the systems architects who helped train them would have given them the same approaches.
The analogy that I could give is that of a journey between 2 points. If I wrote the directions for how to get from London to Gloucester, chances are you'd follow a similar route.
Re:Copyrighting and Idea (Score:3, Interesting)
The Demise of Western civilization (Score:3, Interesting)
Western civilization arose and became dominant through innovation - "Standing on the shoulders of giants." The way patent and copyright laws are going in the West, the giants not only no longer want anyone standing on their shoulders, they don't even want anyone casting similar shadows or reaching for the same goals.
Look to China, and expect them to walk a fine line between sufficient copyright and patent protection that we will still trade with them, yet avoid the sheer lunacy we're seeing now. I wouldn't be surprised if copyright and patent issues force dual-design, in some cases to separate internally acceptable from exportable. Through the next century China's domestic market will be the next boom area, and I doubt they're going to let Western copyright and patent silliness stop them from modernizing, even if it does prevent some exports.
We're imposing legal morbidity on our technology. Those who don't will have an edge over us.
Re:Pattents and Copyrights (Score:4, Interesting)
Fortunately, common sense prevailed, helped along by the good old dollar I've no doubt and they accepted both software patents and a redefinition of copyright to suit global corporations. Once the USA, Japan and Europe had uniform intellectual property laws to protect our corporations and our way of life, everyone else had to play ball or they couldn't trade. The result has been that every algorithm and computer program and every piece of music and film (after all music and film can be put into digital form and are therefore a form of software) have been patented. No more variations on Beethoven (unless you've got the patentees approval). No more amateur participation in music or film which might risk lowering standards. No more challenge to established business and business practices.
Alas, the osopinion site where the letter was published seems to be broken. But thanks to Google's cache, you can still find it [216.239.51.104]. (Could Google get into trouble for caching a subversive letter such as this
Re:Maybe not so cut-and-dried... (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Who owns Visicalc today ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:"Commandeering the plot of a book?" (Score:3, Interesting)
It brings up an issue of interface vs. implementation. I ported a bunch of software for my employer a couple of years ago, and while I needed to duplicate the UI and the output of the ports, I was otherwise free to code it as I wished. (I was porting internally-developed test
I've always believed that I am the sole author of the ports (well, actually, my employer is, but that's a different story), regardless of the fact that I didn't actually design the output or specify the way that the programs got their input. But we're talking thousands of lines that I wrote to get from point A to point B, and a couple hundred hours of working time that it took me to do it.
It sounds like a gray area to me, which, I suppose is the point of allowing the suit to go ahead.