PrintMaster and The PrintShop at War

Broderbund Software, Inc. v. Unison World, Inc., 648 F.Supp. 1127 (N.D. Cal. 1986) (interface of program which generated customized greeting cards copyrightable). "It was actually a landmark case in intellectual property case law, I'm told."

The Print Shop Won

The Print Shop and PrintMaster did not get along as well in the Early Days as they do now. On October 8, 1986, the U.S. District Court, Northern District of California ruled in a court case between Broderbund Software, Inc., and Pixellite Software v. Unison World, Inc. and gave an Opinion and Order in favor of The Print Shop and against PrintMaster.

Broderbund sued Unison, claiming its Print Shop computer program for Apple II computers was infringed by Unison's Printmaster program for IBM computers. (Don Williams was the programmer who eventually produced the first IBM version of The Print Shop for Broderbund in 1985, and Berkley Softworks eventually wrote the Apple II version of PrintMaster.)

Lead On, MacDuff

Unison's program development commenced during license negotiations between the two parties. During this time, the programmer (MacDuff Hughes) was instructed to make the IBM version a copy of Print Shop. They "were going to do a PC version for Broderbund under contract, but Broderbund didn't like the idea of paying much".

When negotiations broke down, the programmer was then instructed to take the present state of the program and enhance it to be a better product than Print Shop ("at the time nobody had ever won a look-and-feel lawsuit").

"We never saw their source code, nor would it have been very useful, since... we wrote PrintMaster in C... Going into the lawsuit, our lawyers took the position that look-and-feel was invalid, and had lots of precedent to back it up."

Leave My Screens Alone

The Court took a broad view of copyright, holding that the copyright in a computer program extends beyond the literal program codes to the structures of the program, including the sequencing and arrangement of its audiovisual displays. Unison's Printmaster held to infringe Print Shop, and Broderbund won with the ruling that " `the overall structure, sequencing and arrangement of screens' in the user interface of a program are protected by copyright..."

Although this case included screen displays, later, in another case, Digital Comm. Assocs. v. Softklone Distrib. Corp., 659 F. Supp. 449 (N.D. Ga. 1987), the court found this to be erroneous.

Debate also continues, with one side saying that in these cases, as with Lotus Dev. Corp. v. Paperback Software Int'l, 740 F. Supp. 37 (D. Mass. 1990), district courts made a similar analytical mistake in applying copyright law to the outputs of computer programs.

The argument against this being in some cases it may be difficult to classify a given interface as one or the other. Some output formats will contain sufficient original expression to merit protection.

What are the Fundamental Copyright issues for Computer Software?

Leave My Ideas Alone

Why Copyright is used beyond the protection of "purely artistic" artifacts in a computer program can be a puzzling topic. If we consider Copyright in music, for example, we would certainly not consider the topic of a song to be Copyrighted. The average person would usually consider only a literal "rip off" copy of a song to be a violation of the artist's Copyright.

But it is usually the idea and not the expression which is valuable for computer software, and that is the exact opposite of what copyright protects.

Copyright has necessarily been stretched out of its true ambit to include the 'structure, sequence and organisation' (Whelan v Jaslow) and the 'look and feel' (Broderbund Software Inc. v Unison World Inc.) of programs. This has happened because the use of copyright for 'literary work' as such does not enable software to be protected in the way that the computer industry would wish.

A Question of Balance

Copyright in software is extremely subjective. It is held by the industry that Copyright is supposed to balance effective protection for intellectual property rights in computer programs with the need for a free flow of information to encourage competition.

The use of copyright to protect computer software is the result of lobbying by companies to a perceived problem (in the mid 1970's) of home copying of computer games and counterfeiting of them in the Pacific Basin. Companies suffering from this 'piracy' were in the entertainment business and already using copyright to restrict the use of their goods, and decided to use copyright to protect computer software.

While the 'literary expression' of computer code comes under the Berne Convention, it is a rare program where the codes are the valuable aspect.

More fundamentally, basic copyright law requires that outputs of computer programs be evaluated solely on the basis of their own merits as expressive works of authorship and not any copyright in the program that produces them.

Who was the lawyer?

Claude M. Stern <cstern@fenwick.com> is a partner in the Litigation and Intellectual Property Groups at Fenwick & West LLP, a law firm in Palo Alto, specializing in representing technology clients.

Mr. Stern has served as lead trial counsel in a number of precedent setting cases, including Broderbund Software, Inc. v. Unison World, Inc., the pioneering case in the area of user-interface copyrightability.


© CopyLeft Bill Buckels 1999
All Rights Reversed.