SOFTWARE INFRINGEMENT


The prosecution of software infringement


The capability of Indian courts to interpret and analyse software infringement has yet to catch up with the rapid pace of technology, but positive signs in the US and UK should help practitioners in India and elsewhere. Mahua Roy Chowdhury of Solomon & Roy reports.


I


n the digital era, every country is witnessing increasing litigation


courts and even litigators prepared to handle such


With no precedent in India, we will analyse over soſt ware infringement. But are our civil complex cases and analysis? Many


countries have been able to set up special intellectual property courts and may have the privilege of having a judiciary and attorneys with expertise in soſt ware. But many other countries have yet to achieve


this. Further, most jurisdictions do not allow soſt ware or algorithms to be patented per se. T erefore, only copyright can then be enforced, that is without any ‘claims’ (metes and bounds as provided in a patent), and it is analysed only as ‘literary language’. In this context, content owners and right owners face greater challenges in enforcing their rights in an ordinary civil court.


The UK position One recent (2013) judgment is SAS Institute v World Programming, which affi rmed the factors laid down in Navitaire v EasyJet and Bulletproof Technologies. T e English Court of Appeal upheld that the functionality of soſt ware cannot be protected by copyright. Functionality constitutes the idea of the programmer, whereas the source code is the expression of the idea used to achieve the functionality. T e overall functionality in the Navitaire


case is: check fl ight-check availability of seats- reserve-take passengers’ details-take payment details-record transaction. T ese are common


78 World Intellectual Property Review Annual 2015 World Intellectual Property Review November/December 2014


how courts in the UK and US have taken diff erent approaches and whether the same can be applied in Indian courts.


to a fl ight reservation system and constitute core functions of the system. T e problem, if one is to arrive at a fi nding of infringement, is to settle on a level of abstraction that describes something that is not merely inherent in the nature of the business function to be performed by the soſt ware, but represents the skill and labour of the designers and programmers and goes wider than the details of the command set and the screen displays, and is taken by the defendants. ‘Access’ was also considered an important


factor by the court and the facts surrounding it were considered signifi cant. T e court observed that where a programmer has observed, tested and formulated soſt ware that is similar to the infringed soſt ware, in the absence of any access to the original source code it may not be considered an infringement of soſt ware.


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