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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."
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
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?
Cheerio!
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
"A lot of patents are like this.... How is this different?"
You patent an idea. You only copyright a work.
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."
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.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
They say the first thing to go is your penis. Well, it's either that or your brain. I forget which...
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...
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
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.
Considering that Shakespeare stole heavily from older works I think he best keep his mouth shut.
:-)
Your post accurately points out a perfect example of how our modern, enlightened Intellectual Property system prevents thieves, such as Shakespere, from infringing the IP of others' hard work.
The price of freedom is eternal litigation.
Come on, tell the truth. We all know that Shakespeare copied Hamlet out of SCO's System V source code.
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