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British Court Issues Bizarre Copyright Ruling
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."
This is silly. I am suing all males of the human species, because their penis infringes upon my own penis's "functional structure" (although I admit that due to their vastly smaller size, our structures are different).
Come to think of it, I guess that my father would call me out on the whole "prior art" thing there.
it's like the malloc (sp?) thing all over again. two airlines needing a piece of software to do the SAME THING. How many correct ways are there to do it?
From an outsider's point of view, a stranger to word processing, one would draw EXTREME similarities to MS Word vs. a Corel alternative.
Is it copyright infringement? They both allow you to do the same thing in almost exactly the same way. .
seems crazy right?
-rich
A lot of patents are like this.. Vague concepts with no implementation details. Even if two different people have vastly different implementations that do the same thing, and one of them has a patent for the "thing", they can be sued. How is this different?
But on the other hand if they loose that would make a legal precedence that copyright doesn't cover functionallity which would be a good thing.
So what if it's written in different code? I can play pop songs on a trombone and record it. It's still the same song and it's still infringement.
Copyrighting an idea is wrong, but that's not what the question is here. This is an example of determining whether both products implement the idea in a close enough way to be infringement and code is completely irrelevant to that discussion.
--- Don't be a player hater: I meta-mod ALL negative mods as Unfair.
Travel booking programs are particularly complex and it appears that the two programs here share enough logic for the VB version to be infringing.
It is not unreasonable: if I sing "happy birthday" on the air, I have to pay copyright fees. So if I rewrite someone's code in another language (or even the same language), why do copyright fees not apply?
It is far better that copyright be applied to this kind of case (assuming the infringing program actually is a rewrite, not a coincidence) than patent law. At least with copyright you know that a clean-room rewrite is safe. With patents you won't know until the lawyers knock.
Ceci n'est pas une signature
The case might not have much merit, but there's not enough detail for us to decide that - and no apparent reason to dismiss it as 'bizarre'. Don't you remember that Apple sued M$ over the 'look and feel' of Windows? And if I wrote a program that exactly duplicated the functionality of Warcraft III (even if all the code was my own) do you think I wouldn't get sued by Blizzard? Everything depends on what the patents and copyrights cover.
"A lot of patents are like this.... How is this different?"
You patent an idea. You only copyright a work.
My local LUG invited a copyright lawyer from Widner last year to come in and talk about some tihng, and he covered this. He told us that copyright law protects not only the form but the basic plot as well. Were Shakespeare alive today, he would have a fairly good lawsuit against Disney for infringing on Hamlet.
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
Actually, the history of 20th century copyright law -- esp. in the US but in Europe as well -- is a blurring of the boundaries between idea and expression, those boundaries being the cornerstone of copyright law previously. This is primarily the effect of movie studios and producers suing people for similar adaptations of similar stories and winning. Siva V. writes about this in Copyrights and Copywrongs. Lawyers for the movie industry went to such lengths to protect their works from imitation that copyright law now recognizes a certain level of idea protection. It's ironic because the film industry got its power in the first place in part because of a strict boundary between idea and expression. But in any case it is not surprising to see this trend manifesting in debates over copyright of computer code.
I maintain a large VB project, which is a port from a previous COBOL project. Most of it is pretty much identical, only the syntax of the language has changed.
If I took the linux kernel, ran it through a C to C# (or whatever) translator, is that an infringement?
What if I just compiled it, and disassembled the binary into ASM?
What about translating a French/Russian novel into English, then selling it as my own?
Things aren't as black and white as you think they are.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
Perhaps this a case of mad judge disease!
Anyone who thinks the courts are logical should remember that in France a court found a cow guilty of murder and in Salem a court convicted women of being witches.
Not much has changed since then it would seem.
Should have a city technology consultant, before making these types of rulings.
Who want's to bet that this judge is one of those "computer experts" who's call's to tech support make the christmas party laugh track.
How many ways are there to effectively and efficiently solve a problem/need? Won't most solutions begin to look similar? Will this continue until it's just the first company to come up with a solution that can put a copyright on the functionality? You think software is crappy now...
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Perhaps...
But the article clearly states that Bulletproof had no access to either the source code or objects from the previous (Navitaire) application.
It's a "clean room" reimplementation of the functionality - an entirely different thing than porting an application using a different language.
If this is decided against Bulletproof, it has *enormous* consequences for the software industry - open and proprietary alike.
If what's at question is the copyrightable nature of functional structure, then we're free to draw from as many different fields as we'd like to prove prior art. Or, at least, that the subject is irrelevant.
As a very basic example, every english student is taught pretty much the same way to write an essay. Does that mean that whoever wrote the first essay can now file a lawsuit against all students across the world and history?
From a more recent perspective: Cars have four wheels, a power source, and a passenger compartment. Does that mean the inventor of the first "horseless carriage" can file a lawsuit against everyone one supplies a product satisfying those requirements?
From the doomsayer's department: SCO, here we go...again
What's this Submit thingy do?
So, how is the example irrelevant to what it addresses, the idea that two applications in different languages cannot be a violation?
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
the idea/expression dichotomy is dead. You can copyright 1+1=2 these days. Copyrights have become perpetual patents. Why? Because that's what most people seem to want.
Stupid people make stupid things profitable.
How about we make it such that software is protected by neither copyright nor patents!
With the WWW, the first person to post his code gets the credit, and anyone else who claims that code under their name has to face the prior art of the first person. There would be no legal recourse; the surfacing of the truth should be sufficient.
This is probably much more in line with BSD licensing, where anyone can use the code with proper credit given. Given that the WWW/Usenet/etc. provide a widely mirrored hard-to-fake timeline of history, it is extremely unlikely that devious behavior could last long nor is it likely that everything would decompose into anarchy.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin