Дело Computer Associates v. Altai: Защита нелитеральных элементов программного обеспечения авторским правом.

American legal case

Computer Associates International, Inc. v. Altai, Inc., 982 F.2d 693 (2d Cir. 1992) is a decision from the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit that addressed to what extent non literal elements of software are protected by copyright law. The court used and recommended a three step process called the Abstraction Filtration Comparison test. The case was an appeal from the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York in which the district court found that defendant Altai's OSCAR 3.4 computer program had infringed plaintiff Computer Associates' copyrighted computer program entitled CA SCHEDULER. among others). The issue in this case is whether and to what extent copyright protects non literal elements of program code, the structure, sequence and organization of the program. Although a few courts had examined this issue, this was the first of its kind in this circuit.

In the appeal, CA disputed the district court's finding that the OSCAR 3.5 did not have substantial similarity to CA's ADAPTER. They claimed that the district court did not apply a proper test that took into consideration the copying of non literal elements of computer software. They claimed that despite the clean room rewrite, there was substantial similarity in the structures of ADAPTER including flow charts, inter modular relationships, parameter lists, macros, and services obtained from the operating system. To approach this issue, the court fully supported the claim that non literal elements of software are protected under copyright. Software is considered a literary work for the purposes of copyright law, and non literal elements of literary works are protected under copyright. As such, non literal elements of software are also protected. The question at hand was to what extent are the non literal elements protected. Copyright protects the expression of an idea but not the idea itself. As such, it is important to determine where to draw the line between expression and idea. The court agreed with the opinion in Baker v. Selden which stated that things that "must necessarily be used as incident to" the idea are not subject to copyright protection. This opinion, however, gave no advice on how to separate the idea from the expression. Facing a similar issue, Whelan v. Jaslow attempted to delineate the differences between idea and expression by saying that the function of the work is the idea and everything else not necessary to the function is the expression of the idea. The court agreed with district court's refusal to follow the Whelan logic because the test is "conceptually overbroad." Upon revisiting the matter of trade secret misappropriation, the court found that with Arney's potential breach of confidentiality and Altai's potential liability for improper trade secret acquisition, these extra elements differentiate the trade secret misappropriation claim from the copyright infringement claim. The court vacated the district court's preemption ruling and remanded the case back to the district court.

The abstraction filtration comparison test has been quickly adopted by the courts. In fact, every court since 1992[ 2006] has chosen to use the 3 step filtration test over the Whelan test. Some, however, have criticized the approach and claim that it overly narrows the scope of copyright protection. CA and other large computer companies argue that without broader protection, the test will stifle development and disincentivize programmers from actively designing and improving programs.