Opinion ID: 6487
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 9

Heading: copyrightability of

Text: INPUT/OUTPUT FORMATS AND USER INTERFACES EDI has registered copyrights in four user manuals containing detailed verbal descriptions and pictorial representations of input and output formats. EDI contends that SSI and Guntur infringed EDI's copyrights by copying a portion of its user manuals -- the input and output formats -- and incorporating them into the StruCAD user manual and into StruCAD's user interface. This, EDI maintains, is either direct unlawful copying under 17 U.S.C. § 106(1) or unlawful preparation of a derivative work under 17 U.S.C. § 106(2). To establish copyright infringement, a plaintiff must prove ownership of a valid copyright and copying of constituent elements of the work that are copyrightable. Feist Publications, Inc. v. Rural Tel. Service Co., 499 U.S. 340, 361, 111 S.Ct. 1282, 1296 (1991). Copyright ownership is shown by proof of originality and copyrightability in the work as a whole and by compliance with applicable statutory formalities.3 Plains Cotton Coop. Ass'n. v. Goodpasture Computer Serv., Inc., 807 F.2d 1256, 1260 (5th Cir.), cert. denied, 484 U.S. 821 (1987). Two separate components underlie proof of actionable copying. First is the factual question whether the alleged infringer actually used the copyrighted material to create his own work. Copying as a factual matter typically may be inferred from proof of access to the 3 EDI complied with the statutory formalities in regard to the user manuals and input formats and output reports reproduced therein. 9 copyrighted work and probative similarity.4 Plains Cotton, 807 F.2d at 1260. Not all copying, however, is copyright infringement. Feist, 499 U.S. at 361, 111 S.Ct. at 1296. The second and usually more difficult question is whether the copying is legally actionable. This requires a court to determine whether there is substantial similarity between the two works. Plains Cotton, 807 F.2d at 1260. On appeal, SSI does not contest the validity of EDI's ownership in the four copyrighted user manuals as a whole. Nor is copying as a factual matter disputed; Guntur candidly testified that he used EDI's formats when developing StruCAD. Instead, SSI raises several contentions. First, SSI asserts that under this court's Plains Cotton decision, which allegedly approved the Synercom district court decision, user input formats are not copyrightable as a matter of law. SSI elaborates upon this argument by pointing out that nine of the formats found uncopyrightable in Synercom are nevertheless alleged by EDI here to be protected. Second, SSI asserts that EDI's computer input and output formats represent unoriginal facts and lists of facts that are not copyrightable and thus are not subject to infringement. Third, SSI contends that the SACS IV input and output formats represent an uncopyrightable idea, process or method. EDI 4 Professor Latman distinguishes between probative similarity, which relates to factual copying, and substantial similarity, which relates to actionable copying. See 3 Melville B. & David Nimmer, Nimmer on Copyright § 13.01[B] (1993) (hereinafter Nimmer); see also Gates Rubber Co. v. Bando Chemical Indus., Ltd., 9 F.3d 823, 832 (10th Cir. 1993) (adopting same terminology). 10 distinguishes the instant case from Synercom and responds that its input and output formats, at least when taken as a whole, are copyrightable. EDI further argues that SSI has infringed EDI's copyright by SSI's massive appropriation of plaintiff's expression at the interface. This inquiry represents a subset of the general questions surrounding computer program copyrightability. Some of the issues in this novel and complex area of law are slowly being resolved. Congress has declared that computer programs are in principle entitled to copyright protection.5 That decision largely overcame, though it does not fully answer, one major statutory exception to copyrightability, the useful article exception.6 Most courts confronted with the issue have determined that copyright protection extends not only to the literal elements of a program, i.e., its source code and object code,7 but also to its nonliteral elements, such as the program architecture, structure, sequence and organization, operational modules, and computer-user interface. See, e.g., Computer Assocs. Int'l, Inc. v. Altai, Inc., 5 A computer program is a set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer in order to bring about a certain result. 17 U.S.C. § 101. 6 In no case does copyright protection for an original work of authorship extend to any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery, regardless of the form in which it is described, explained, illustrated, or embodied in such work. 17 U.S.C. § 102(b). 7 Source code is the programming language readable by human programmers; object code is the binary expression that controls the computer hardware. 11 982 F.2d 693 (2d Cir. 1992); Gates Rubber Co. v. Bando Chemical Indus., 9 F.3d 823 (10th Cir. 1993); Lotus Development Corp. v. Paperback Software Int'l, 740 F.Supp. 37 (D.Mass. 1990) (Lotus I). But as one moves away from the literal code to more general levels of a program, it becomes more difficult to distinguish between unprotectible ideas, processes, methods or functions, on one hand, and copyrightable expression on the other. Lotus I, 740 F.Supp. at 53. Court decisions are, generously described, in a state of creative ferment concerning the methods by which nonliteral elements of computer programs may be identified and analyzed for copyrightability.8 Until recently, it could be argued that Fifth Circuit precedent precluded recognition of the copyrightability of nonliteral elements of computer programs. This argument was based on the Plains Cotton case, an alleged Fifth Circuit endorsement of the district court decision in Synercom. Synercom, decided before Congress passed the 1980 amendments to the Copyright Act, held that 80-column data cards, developed for an early species of punch-card computers, represented an uncopyrightable process or idea because they could not be divorced from their mode of expression. SSI and the district court interpreted Plains Cotton broadly as adopting Synercom. That Plains Cotton did not actually do so has now been settled by this court in Kepner-Tregoe, Inc. v. Leadership Software 8 Compare the approaches used by the courts in Whelan Assocs., Inc. v. Jaslow Dental Lab., Inc., 797 F.2d 1222 (3d Cir. 1986), cert. denied, 479 U.S. 1031 (1987); Altai, supra; Lotus I, supra; Brown Bag Software v. Symantec Corp., 960 F.2d 1465 (9th Cir.), cert. denied, 1135 S.Ct. 198 (1992); etc. 12 Inc., 12 F.3d 527 (5th Cir. 1994). Kepner-Tregoe embraced the general, noncontroversial proposition that nonliteral aspects of copyrighted works -- like structure, sequence and organization -- may be protected under copyright law . . . 12 F.3d at 536, n.20. Thus, SSI benefits from no synergy with Synercom.9 But SSI also makes a more particular argument based on Synercom. Because Synercom declared that particular input formats integral to SACS IV's predecessor program (STRAN) were noncopyrightable ideas, SSI contends, the same must be true of those formats descended from STRAN. We disagree. In Synercom, the plaintiff sought copyright protection for individual input formats; here, EDI makes a different claim that several dozen input formats taken together form a copyrightable work, because they represent but one of many ways of expressing a mode of computerized structural analysis. This general point renders Synercom distinguishable. The holding in Kepner-Tregoe resolves only one level of controversy between the parties, albeit the level on which the district court rested his decision. After Kepner-Tregoe, one must conclude that nonliteral elements of computer programs may be copyrightable in the Fifth Circuit, but not that they are 9 SSI contends that we should not analyze the input formats as nonliteral elements because that analysis depends on the existence of a copyright on the underlying program. We reject this argument. It makes no difference to the formats' copyrightability whether we analyze them as springing from a computer program or from a user manual. 13 necessarily copyrightable in this case. To that issue we must turn.