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British Court Issues Bizarre Copyright Ruling

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the thought-we-settled-this-already dept.

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."

4 of 418 comments (clear)

  1. another case of. . by NetMagi · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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

    1. Re:another case of. . by Mr.+Sketch · · Score: 5, Insightful

      They both allow you to do the same thing in almost exactly the same way

      In a non-monopolistic market, we call that 'competition'.

      --
      Things you think are in the Constitution, but are not.
  2. Possibilty by ajnlth · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Copyright != Patent by Grant_Watson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "A lot of patents are like this.... How is this different?"

    You patent an idea. You only copyright a work.