Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai, Inc.
Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai, Inc. | |
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Court | United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit |
Full case name | Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai, Inc. |
Argued | January 9, 1992 |
Decided | June 22, 1992 amended: December 17, 1992 |
Citation(s) | 982 F.2d 693; 119 A.L.R. Fed. 741; 61 USLW 2434, 37 Fed. R. Evid. Serv. 348 |
Holding | |
The court applied the Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison, three-step test to determine whether substantial similarity is met when proving copyright infringement for non-literal elements of software, and it held that Altai's rewritten code did not meet the requirements for copyright infringement, and vacated and remanded the ruling on trade secret misappropriation. | |
Court membership | |
Judge(s) sitting | Frank Altimari, John Mahoney, and John Walker |
Keywords | |
copyright infringement, non-literal elements, substantial similarity, abstraction-filtration-comparison |
Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai, Inc., 982 F.2d 693 (2d Cir. 1992)
Background of the case
In 1982, Altai established their own job scheduler called ZEKE written for the VSE operating system. In efforts to create a version of ZEKE to run on the MVS operating system, Altai employee James Williams recruited his longtime friend Claude Arney, an employee of Computer Associates, to create the MVS version. Williams claims that at the time he did not know about the ADAPTER component or that Arney had familiarity with the CA-SCHEDULER and ADAPTER code. Arney left CA to work on Altai's ZEKE program, taking the VSE and MVS versions of the source code for ADAPTER with him. Using his knowledge of ADAPTER, Arney then convinced Altai to restructure the program to include a program translator to interface with various operating systems. Arney created the translator OSCAR 3.4 for Altai in which about 30% of OSCAR's source code was taken directly from CA's ADAPTER code.
In 1988, CA discovered Altai's use of the CA ADAPTER code and brought an action for copyright infringement and trade secret misappropriation against Altai. In response, Altai ordered a clean room rewrite of the copied portions of the code to be performed by eight programmers who had no knowledge or involvement with the previous OSCAR code. This new program was released as OSCAR 3.5.
In the judgment of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, the Honorable George C. Pratt, United States Circuit Judge found that OSCAR 3.4 was a copyright infringement of CA's CA-SCHEDULER and awarded CA $364,444 in damages and apportioned profits. The district court ruled that OSCAR 3.5 rewrite, on the other hand, did not constitute copyright infringement. It also ruled that the state law trade secret claims were preempted by the federal Copyright Act, and thus Altai was not liable for trade secret misappropriation.
Initially, both parties appealed the judgment. Altai appealed the judgment on OSCAR 3.4, but subsequently dropped the claim. CA appealed the judgment on OSCAR 3.5 and preemption on trade secret misappropriation.
Relevant law
Prior to this case, it had been well established that software can be protected by copyright law. In particular, previous cases have shown that literal elements of program code are protected by copyright (in Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp.[2] among others). The issue in this case is whether and to what extent copyright protects non-literal elements of program code, the structure, sequence and organization of the program. Although a few courts had examined this issue, this was the first of its kind in this circuit.
Issues
In the appeal, CA disputed the district court's finding that the OSCAR 3.5 did not have
To approach this issue, the court fully supported the claim that non-literal elements of software are protected under copyright. Software is considered a literary work for the purposes of copyright law, and non-literal elements of literary works are protected under copyright. As such, non-literal elements of software are also protected.
The question at hand was to what extent are the non-literal elements protected. Copyright protects the expression of an idea but not the idea itself. As such, it is important to determine where to draw the line between expression and idea.
The court agreed with the opinion in Baker v. Selden which stated that things that "must necessarily be used as incident to" the idea are not subject to copyright protection.[3] This opinion, however, gave no advice on how to separate the idea from the expression.
Facing a similar issue, Whelan v. Jaslow attempted to delineate the differences between idea and expression by saying that the function of the work is the idea and everything else not necessary to the function is the expression of the idea.[4] The court agreed with district court's refusal to follow the Whelan logic because the test is "conceptually overbroad."[1] A program can have multiple functions and thus many ideas.
As an alternate metric, the court presented a three-step test to determine substantial similarity,
Decision
The court reexamined the district court's process and found no significant fault with it. After taking out all functional elements and elements from the public domain, only a few lists and macros in OSCAR 3.5 were similar to ADAPTER, and their impact on the program was not large enough to declare copyright infringement. The court found that the similarity in services required by the operating system was due to the nature of the operating system, thus it was not protected by copyright. Similarly, the flow charts were found to be an element dictated by external factors flowing from the nature of the work, also unprotectable by copyright law. In light of this analysis, the court upheld the district courts finding that there was no copyright infringement by OSCAR 3.5.
With respect to code, the district court observed that after the rewrite of OSCAR 3.4 to OSCAR 3.5, "there remained virtually no lines of code that were identical to ADAPTER." Id. at 561. Accordingly, the court found that the code "present[ed] no similarity at all." Id. at 562.
17 U.S.C. § 301.[5]Upon revisiting the matter of trade secret misappropriation, the court found that with Arney's potential breach of confidentiality and Altai's potential liability for improper trade secret acquisition, these extra elements differentiate the trade secret misappropriation claim from the copyright infringement claim. The court vacated the district court's preemption ruling and remanded the case back to the district court.Reactions
The abstraction-filtration-comparison test has been quickly adopted by the courts. In fact, every court since 1992[-2006] has chosen to use the 3-step filtration test over the Whelan test.[6]
Some, however, have criticized the approach and claim that it overly narrows the scope of copyright protection. CA and other large computer companies argue that without broader protection, the test will stifle development and disincentivize programmers from actively designing and improving programs.[1]
See also
Copyright infringement of software List of leading legal cases in copyright law- Analytic dissection
References
- ^ a b c d e f g h Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai, Inc., 982 F.2d 693, (2d Cir. 1992).
- ^ Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp. Archived 2010-05-15 at the Wayback Machine, 714 F.2d 1240 (3d Cir. 1983).
- ^ Baker v. Selden Archived 2009-03-23 at the Wayback Machine, 101 U.S. 99 (1879).
- ^ Whelan Associates Inc. v. Jaslow Dental Laboratory, Inc. Archived 2012-05-31 at the Wayback Machine, 797 F.2d 1222 (3d Cir. 1986).
- ^ 17 U.S.C. § 301, Preemption with respect to other laws
ISBN 978-0-7355-5864-9Further reading
- Pamela Samuelson, Why Copyright Law Excludes Systems and Processes from the Scope of Its Protection, 85 Tex. L. Rev. 1921, 1969-1971 (2007).
External links