Source: https://www.lrrc.com/Strategies-for-Litigating-Computer-Software-Copyright-Claims-10-01-20071
Timestamp: 2019-04-25 02:15:55+00:00

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If a client came to you and told you that his novel had been stolen and published under the name of another person, the path to litigating your case would be fairly evident. You would take your client’s book, along with any drafts, notes, or other evidence of when she wrote it and compare it to the book published by the alleged thief. You would look for line-by-line copying and for copying of the narrative themes and characters. If the book was published in another language, you would hire a translator to compare your client’s version to the published work to find any similarities indicating copying. Your lifelong familiarity with printed fiction as well as nonfiction would make litigating the case straightforward for you and for the jury.
Computer software is a different matter altogether. Although governed by the same provisions in the Copyright Act as other literary works, copyright cases involving computer software present special challenges. Unlike copyright cases involving works we are familiar with—say a book, a song, or a painting, where we as litigators start with at least a superficial familiarity of the medium upon which we can begin our assessment of the case and preparation of our litigation strategy—software cases often present the challenge of how to litigate the unfamiliar.
An initial hurdle for the litigator facing a software copyright infringement case is to understand the precise rights at issue. Software cases often involve rights that fall within the realm of different laws, including patent law, copyright law, and trade secrets law, among others. Differentiating among these laws and their corresponding rights and protections is essential.
Generally speaking, patent law protects inventions, copyright law protects creative expression, and trade secrets law protects confidential business information. As applied to computer software, these lines are easily blurred. Under the patent laws, a computer program is patentable if it is novel and accomplishes a function that has some practical application. Patentability lies in the function accomplished by the software rather than the elegance of how the programmers expressed that functionality in the software. Copyright protection, in contrast, extends only to the programmers’ original, creative expression and not to the functionality imparted by the software. This distinction can be a fine line when dealing with computer software because software, unlike other creative works such as literature or music, typically serves a functional purpose. That functionality, however, is not protected by the Copyright Act. The processes and algorithms embodied in the software might be patentable, but they cannot be copyrighted. Copyright law protects only the expression used to accomplish the functionality, not the underlying functionality itself. E.g., Apple Computer, Inc. v.Microsoft Corp., 35 F.3d 1435 (9th Cir. 1994).
Trade secrets law, in turn, differs from both patent and copyright laws. Trade secrets protection turns not on the creativity or functionality of the information for which protection is sought but rather on whether the information is valuable to a company because it is not known to its competitors. Importantly, a computer program can be eligible for patent, copyright, and trade secrets protection, although the protection afforded by each of these different areas of law is unique and specific.
All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association. organization. And protection can also extend to any audiovisual displays generated by the program, even if the underlying instructions used to create the displays are not themselves copyrightable.
Written agreements are a prudent measure to avoid surprises about who owns what.
All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association. for hire” owned by the party paying them to write it. 17 U.S.C. § 201(b); Community for Creative Non-Violence v. Reid, 490 U.S. 730, 742-43 (1989). Ownership is often at issue in litigation. Written agreements are a prudent measure to avoid surprises about who owns what and to pin down the employment status of contributing authors. Written agreements are especially crucial if contract programmers are involved in the creation of the software, in which case agreements should be in place that specify what ownership, if any, the programmers will obtain in the software they create. Written agreements are also important when hiring another company to write custom software. The agreements should make clear whether your client will acquire a license, an exclusive license, or ownership of the custom code being created for it. Of course, the hiring company should ensure that the company writing the software has agreements in place with its own programmers to ensure that the company, rather than the programmers, owns and can assign the rights in the software. The lawyer faced with litigating a software copyright case should be conscious of software-related issues from the outset. Before any confidential source code is produced, a confidentiality order should be in place to protect the client’s valuable trade secrets. Often, such confidentiality orders restrict review of the produced source code to only trial counsel and independent experts. E.g., Brown Bag Software v. Symantec Corp., 960 F.2d 1465 (9th Cir. 1992) (restricting in-house counsel from reviewing trade secret information produced in discovery). Before jumping into a restrictive confidentiality order, however, consider the ramifications. Often you can obtain tremendous benefit by having someone who is familiar with your client’s software, such as your client’s chief programmer, analyze the opposing party’s software for similarities. The tradeoff, of course, is that for this to happen, you will have to agree to reciprocal analysis of your client’s software by her adversary— something to which your client will likely be loathe to agree. And disclosure of your client’s source code to her adversary could destroy trade secrets protection over her software. Our suggestion is that you consider this decision carefully. The quick decision is typically to prevent all party representatives from examining the other side’s software, but our experience is that at some point in the case you will really want your client’s assistance to analyze the key copyright issues of substantial similarity and protectable expression. You should balance that possibility against the need to protect your client’s own secrets. The new federal electronic discovery rules have raised the prominence of e-discovery in almost every case. But electronic discovery takes on additional importance in the software copyright case. In other types of civil litigation, electronic evidence is one of many types of evidence that might reveal relevant information about the parties’ claims and defenses, even though the claims themselves do not require that evidence be in an electronic form. In the software copyright case, the claims are usually focused on creation and ownership of electronic information, and the key evidence in the case is almost certain to be in electronic form. Perhaps the most basic evidence in a software case will be the parties’ respective source codes. You will need to obtain the source code to the software at issue in electronic form because that is really the only form useful for thorough expert analysis. Additionally, the computers on which the software was written, the computers on which it has been stored, and electronic copies of the software that can be found on any media (e.g., CDs, floppy disks, flash drives) should also be forensically inspected by experts for information about the circumstances in which the software was written, revised, or copied. Metadata is especially critical evidence in the software copyright case. Examination of the computers used to create the software at issue, and their storage media, can reveal creation dates, modification dates, and the contents of different iterations of the software.
Another source of useful information is provided by “version control systems” that are commonly used by programmers to track changes made to software both during its initial development phase and later during revisions and updates. These systems, which are akin to the document management programs that many lawyers use to store and share documents within their firms, provide valuable information including dates, identities of programmers, and copies of prior versions of the software. Given the importance of this electronic evidence to proving your case, you should consult with your client at the earliest possible opportunity about preserving and assembling its own electronic evidence, send timely and detailed preservation letters to the other side, and carefully craft discovery requests to obtain that key information.
(2) infringement of that copyright. Given the complexities of many software copyright cases, especially if ownership is hotly contested, it often makes sense to bifurcate these issues, with ownership adjudicated first, then infringement and damages.
Verbatim searches should be combined with other types of copy-detection comparisons.
All rights reserved. This information or any portion thereof may not be copied or disseminated in any form or by any means or stored in an electronic database or retrieval system without the express written consent of the American Bar Association. dence from your own witnesses and in cross-examination, and your comfort with the technical subject matter goes a long way to establish your credibility with the judge and jury and makes them more comfortable in deciding the issues. Do not forget the importance of themes and narratives in the presentation of your case. Just because the subject matter is highly technical and an expert is almost certainly required does notmean that youmust depart fromaccessible, common themes in presenting your case. Copyright is still a very human story— someone who worked hard to create something unique should be able to usewhat shemade and be proud of it.Themes of theft, deception, and dishonesty are common in copyright cases and make even highly technical subject matter more accessible to the judge and jury.
The Copyright Act allows the court, once liability is determined, to “award a reasonable attorney’s fee to the prevailing party as part of the costs.” 17 U.S.C. § 505. Fees are awardable to the prevailing party, whether it is plaintiff or defendant. Whether to award fees is left to the court’s discretion. The factors a courtmay considerwhen exercising its discretion include, but are not limited to, “frivolousness, motivation, objective unreasonableness (both in the factual and in the legal components of the case) and the need in particular circumstances to advance considerations of compensation and deterrence.” Fogerty v. Fantasy, Inc., 510 U.S. 517, 534 n.19 (1994). Courts even allow fee awards to include costs and fees associated with the prosecution or defense of other claims, such as unfair competition and defamation, if those claims and the copyright claims involve a common core of facts or are based on related legal theories, and can include fees incurred in connection with interlocutory appeals. E.g., Twentieth Century Fox FilmCorp. v. Entertainment Distributing, 429 F.3d 869, 884 (9th Cir. 2005), cert. denied, 126 S. Ct. 2932 (2006). In a sense, the key lesson of our experience—and this article— is that litigating the software copyright case is just like litigating any other case.You will need to investigate the claims, assemble the evidence, and set forth your proof in a compelling, comprehensible manner. The fact that a case involves software just requires you to take the necessary steps to plan for and understand technical subjectmatter, just as you would in a case involving technical evidence of any other kind, be it medical, scientific, or statistical. The peculiar nature of software, particularly its manifestation in both object and subject code, simply dictates some of the ways in which you will take the steps on that familiar path.

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