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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.
And the prosecutor is a Mr. Black Adder right?
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?
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).
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.
Navitaire was arguing that BulletProof Technologies had studied the Openres system closely and produced a system that operated in the same way.
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?
~ Whence do you come, slayer of men, or where are you going, conqueror of space?
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.
This could put a great new twist on the IE vs Netscape story.
This space intentionally left blank
Cheerio!
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
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.
First of all, this also sounds like a rehash of the "look and feel" lawsuits between Microsoft and Apple. "Your program looks like ours, so you obviously stole it!"
Second, if you couldn't "commandeer" plots, I doubt anybody would be writing any books these days.
I copyrighted it, thankyou. You shall be receiving your bill shortly.
"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!!!!
Ford has filed suit against General Motors for making something that also has four wheels and can transport passengers, by way of an internal combustion engine.
A Ford spokesperson has said: "There will be more lawsuits in the future against other vehicle manufacturers, but we felt like we needed to go after the biggest fish first.
"We realize that this will be met with some hostility, but we are doing this to protect a consumer, we feel that anyone else making such a product is watering down the concept of a 'vehicle' and that having this protected will allow us to continue to innovate.
"Also, we are in talks with SCO to discuss a possible licensing scheme, whereby all owners of non-Ford cars can pay a fee to have their cars properly licensed for Ford's IP."
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.
Why did Australia get all the criminals and American get all the religious fanatics? Because Australia got first pick!
"Freedom means freedom for everybody" -- Dick Cheney
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.
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?"
0x or or snor perron?!
This is clearly a criminal case. Bulletproof should be charged in criminal court for using Visual Basic. I don't ever want to hear "airline" and "Visual Basic" in the same sentence.
-=-=-=-=- osjedi uses Debian GNU/Linux. -=-=-=-=-
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?
The software company "Navitaire" has announced they are changing their name to "Naivete".
A company spokeperson stated "our new corporate name better reflects our understanding of copyright law."
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
Microsoft probably "studied the [XYZ] system closely and produced a system that operated in the same way" as many times as anyone else has.
.NET? Who saw that and didn't think Java?
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.
What does Utah have to do with anything? Bulletproof is in California and Navitaire is in Minnesota (according to their website).
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.
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
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.
This is going to be a disaster for the romance novel industry.
- It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times. Stupid Monkey!!
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?
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.
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
Here it is, and I'm not even kidding.
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.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
...they're both written in awful languages!
A copyright is designed to protect the expression of an idea, not the idea itself. Likewise, a patent is designed to protect the implementation of an idea, not the idea itself. Ideas and thoughts are meant to be free; there should be no rights of exclusivity on human thought.
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.
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.
I believe that the relevant US case here is Whelan v. Jaslow, in which the court finds that copyright protection of computer programs may extend beyond the programs' literal code to their structure, sequence, and organization.
IBM owns VisiCalc. Back when 1-2-3 eclipsed VC in the spreadsheet market, Lotus bought the company out, and of course IBM now owns Lotus. They don't seem especially fond of MS these days. Incidentally, Dan Bricklin (creator of VisiCalc, for the kidz in the audience) has permission from Lotus/IBM to offer the original VC for DOS 1.0 on his website.
I'm not sure about "octopus" though. Is the plural form "octopuses" or "octopi"? I know I've heard (non-techie) people pluralize it as "octopi" so that plural form must be at least semi-legit.
I think technically it may be octopodes, but I didn't study ancient Greek. The common usage in these here parts is octopuses, but if you don't want to embarrass yourself in the local pet shop when buying two of them then try this:
You: Can I buy an octopus please?
Shopkeeper: Will that be all, sir?
You: Hmm, better give me another to keep it company.
Gr
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
So you can't copy a plot anymore? Oh well, Hollywood can forget about any British releases of their films.