Federal Court Ruling Endangers High-Tech Innovation, Open Source Software

File Under: 2005, Copyright

Sep 2, 2005

A federal appeals court in St. Louis has dealt yet another blow to high tech innovation, the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA) and Open Source and Industry Alliance (OSAIA) said today.

In an opinion released Thursday, a panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled that volunteer software developers violated federal copyright law in producing an open source program that successfully competed against a well known proprietary program.

The defendant developers “reverse engineered” Blizzard Entertainment’s Battle.net online game service in order to develop an alternative to the computer crashes, hackers, and profanity common on Blizzard’s commercial system. The court found that developers violated both law and Blizzard’s software license when they examined the Blizzard’s code and then tried to emulate its behavior in their own software. Blizzard Entertainment is a division of Vivendi Universal.

CCIA and OSAIA earlier filed a brief in support of the software developers.

“Today, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act was used to punish innovators whose only offense was building a better mousetrap,” CCIA and OSAIA President Ed Black said. “The DMCA was intended to protect artists from online copyright infringement, not insulate inferior products from competition.

“We're disappointed by the opinion's lack of analysis of the crucial interoperability issues in this case,” Black said. “This is yet another example of anticompetitive abuses of the DMCA. This law undermines free enterprise and must be reformed.”