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."

Comments

Pattents and Copyrights

[mgcsinc]

This is a place where the definitions in copyright and patent law become sketchy and begin to blur together. The question at hand seems to be one of whether GUI's and other elements of program I/O (this so-called "functional structure") come under copyright protection as elements of a creative rendering or patent protection as means of achieving a computational purpose; the idea that such elements may be shakily protected by both seems dangerous and a strong possibility, in Britain's case anyway (although the actual case has yet to commence).

Re:Pattents and Copyrights

[DickBreath]

I think that Mark Summerfield's famous "Letter from 2020" touched on this.

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 . (Could Google get into trouble for caching a subversive letter such as this :-)

Re:"Commandeering the plot of a book?"

[stratjakt]

No, there could be something to this case.

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!

[Esion Modnar]

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).

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:Why is this bizarre?

[stratjakt]

Capcom v. Data East

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

[zmooc]

In a way, they're right; there are basicly 2 ways of looking at software. The first way is to consider software some kind of apparatus, the second way is to consider it a work of art. And us Open Source guys always use the latter as an argument in our battle against software patents. So from that I deduce that most of "us" consider the latter approach the right one. At least, I do.

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering that Shakespeare stole heavily from older works I think he best keep his mouth shut.

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.

Lotus vs. Borland

[sealawyer2003]

This case is being compared to Lotus v. Borland. In that US case the trial court initially got found infringement. An appellate court overturned the decision, and the Supreme Court was split 4-4 with one judge not taking part. That means that the Lotus v. Borland case is the law in only one circuit in the US. I would expect the courts in other circuits might very well reach a different decision.