Pumfrey J of the High Court of England and Wales yesterday granted leave to appeal in a copyright infringement case between two rival airline ticket-booking software devlopers. Though the competing products were programmed in entirely different languages (Cobol and Visual Basic [heh]), Pumfrey J noted the similarities in ‘functional structure’, drawing an analogy to the plot of a book.
The defendant airline Easyjet (which sought to create its own functionally equivalent program) will respond to Navitaire’s claim on 3 November. A successful appeal has the potential to render any program that operates similarly to another one – even if written from scratch in different code – a potential infringement.
This sounds suspiciously similar to the whole Lotus Development Corp v Borland International Inc saga of the late 1990s, in which the United States Supreme Court chose not to extend protection to a program’s menu system. Similarities in look and feel weren’t considered then – why should they be now? Surely consistency in user interfaces, program structure, and code formatting is to be encouraged, not prohibited.
