Slashdot Mirror
British Police Accused of Stealing Software
judgecorp writes "The West Yorkshire police force is in the British High court today, accused of stealing intellectual property from a firm whose software decodes forensic data from mobile phones. Forensic Telecoms Services claims the force illegally used and sold copyright data from a commercial mobile phone forensics application it had been using in high profile cases."
Specifically, the article alleges that they used (part of) a list of results from the manual of a private system when they developed a competing application. The case seems flimsy, they're going to have to prove that the list should be considered "a work" as opposed to just data. Data isn't protected unless it has some merit of it's own. Lists are generally not protected.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
yes they were... From TFA..."but the force went on to repeat alleged infringement in 2007 when it updated the software, now named OLIVE, and made it commercially available."