1995). Lotus petitioned the Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari, which was granted; however, because of a split opinion, the Supreme Court affirmed.
Holding
The judgment of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit is affirmed by an equally divided Court.
, such as the text and layout of menus. Due to the recusal of one justice, the Supreme Court decided the case with an eight-member bench split evenly, leaving the lower court's decision affirmed but setting no national precedent.
Background information
Borland released a spreadsheet product, Quattro Pro, with a compatibility mode in which its menu imitated Lotus 1-2-3, a competing product. None of the source code or machine code that generated the menus was copied, but the names of the commands and the organization of those commands into a hierarchy were virtually identical.[2]
Quattro Pro also contained a "Key Reader" feature, which allowed it to execute Lotus 1-2-3 keyboard macros. To support this feature, Quattro Pro's code contained a copy of Lotus's menu hierarchy in which each command was represented by its first letter instead of its entire name.
Borland CEO Philippe Kahn took the case to the software development community arguing that Lotus's position would stifle innovation and damage the future of software development. The vast majority of the software development community supported Borland's position.[citation needed]
Borland immediately removed the Lotus-based menu system from Quattro Pro, but retained support for its "Key Reader" feature, and Lotus filed a supplemental claim against this feature. A district court held that this also constituted copyright infringement.
Circuit Court case
Borland appealed the decision of the district court arguing that the menu hierarchy is a "method of operation", which is not copyrightable according to 17 U.S.C. § 102(b).
The
VCR. The buttons are used to control the playback of a video tape, just as the menu commands are used to control the operations of Lotus 1-2-3. Since the buttons are essential to operating the VCR, their layout cannot be copyrighted. Likewise, the menu commands, including the textual labels and the hierarchical layout, are essential to operating Lotus 1-2-3.[6]
The court also considered the impact of their decision on users of software. If menu hierarchies were copyrightable, users would be required to learn how to perform the same operation in a different way for every program, which the court finds "absurd". Additionally, all macros would have to be re-written for each different program, which places an undue burden on users.[7]
Concurring opinion
Judge Michael Boudin wrote a concurring opinion for this case. In this opinion, he discusses the costs and benefits of copyright protection, as well as the potential similarity of software copyright protection to patent protection. He argues that software is different from creative works, which makes it difficult to apply copyright law to software.
His opinion also considers the theory that Borland's use of the Lotus menu is "privileged". That is, because Borland copied the menu for a legitimate purpose of compatibility, its use should be allowed. This decision, if issued by the majority of the court, would have been narrower in scope than the "method of operations" decision. Copying a menu hierarchy would be allowed in some circumstances, and disallowed in others.[8]
Supreme Court case
Lotus petitioned the
recusing.[1] Because the Court split evenly, it affirmed the First Circuit's decision without discussion and did not establish any national precedent on the copyright issue. Lotus's petition for a rehearing by the full court was denied. By the time the lawsuit ended, Borland had sold Quattro Pro to Novell, and Microsoft's Excel
spreadsheet had emerged as the main challenger to Lotus 1-2-3.
Impact
The Lotus decision establishes a distinction in copyright law between the
software clone
for infringement and compliance cases.
Lotus v. Borland has been used as a lens through which to view the controversial case in
application programming interfaces (APIs) and interoperability of software. Software APIs are designed to allow developers to insure compatibility, but should APIs be found to be copyrightable, that could drastically affect the development of software, as the threat of litigation for building interoperability (a core feature of computing, as it has developed over the decades of worldwide use) would present a chilling effect and coerce the establishment of walled gardens around islands of mutually-incompatible software ecosystems, causing millions of man-hours to be lost in re-implementation and quality assurance testing of the same software across multiple concurrent systems, leading to divergent software development paths and a drastically increased attack surface for potential illicit exploitation.[2]