Business Technology; Ruling Restricts Software Copyright Protection
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A small Texas software publisher has won a significant court victory sharply limiting large companies’ ability to use copyrights to restrict competition in the computer industry. The ruling came late Monday in an appeal of a lawsuit brought by Computer Associates International Inc., the nation’s second-largest software company, against Altai Inc., the publisher of a program for mainframe computers. The suit was filed over Altai’s use of a portion of a program for which Computer Associates holds the copyright. Although the ruling is limited to a dispute over a program used on a small number of large, expensive computers, the appeals court opinion could affect legal battles between leading personal computer forces like the Lotus Development Company, Borland International, Apple Computer, Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard. The Altai case has been closely watched by the computer industry. At stake is the issue of whether copyright protection hinders or fosters innovation and a debate over intellectual property protection that has divided the industry in recent years. Increasingly, the intense competition in the computer industry in the last decade has extended into courtrooms as makers of innovative software programs have sought to limit their competitors’ ability to write programs that are compatible or work in a similar fashion. Legal experts agreed yesterday that the impact of the court’s ruling would be substantial, but they disagreed about whether it would promote healthy competition. “This is a breath of fresh air,” said Gervaise Davis 3d, an intellectual property specialist at David & Schroeder, a law firm in Monterey, Calif. “It was violently opposed by a lot of the larger companies who are interested in broadly extending copyright protection to limit competition.” The Monday ruling, handed down by the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in Manhattan, breaks with a 1987 ruling by the Federal Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, in Philadelphia. That case, known as Whelan v. Jaslow, has served as the basis for many highly visible cases argued over software copyright protection in the last five years. It extended legal protection both to the actual programmer’s coding and to the function, or user interface, of a program. But in the ruling that was affirmed on Monday, Judge George C. Pratt, of the Federal District Court in Manhattan, had argued that the Whelan decision was both “inadequate and inaccurate.” More : query.nytimes.com |