Copyright misuse software

GS Suppiger Co. In , the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeal became the first federal appellate court to extend the patent misuse defense to copyrights.

In Apple v. Psystar could thus claim that it had purchased a copy of Mac OS X for each computer it sold, even though only a master version of Mac OS X was installed on each computer. Apple sued Psystar for, among other things, copyright infringement. On appeal, Psystar did not argue that the court erred in finding infringement but did argue that the court should have recognized its defense of copyright misuse.

Before there were many cases regarding patent misuse, but essentially nothing regarding copyright misuse. But in that year, the Fourth Circuit explicitly recognized copyright misuse as analogous to patent misuse in Lasercomb America v. Lasercomb sued for copyright infringement. The court found that Lasercomb was trying to effectively extend the term and scope of its copyright beyond what copyright law permitted, and that would prevent people from legitimately developing competitive software.

That was a misuse by Lasercomb and the court refused to enforce their copyright against Reynolds. An interesting aspect of the case is that Reynolds and his company had never signed the license agreement. The copyright misuse defense is similar to an antitrust claim, where a copyright owner has misused the limited monopoly granted by the copyright.

This may harm the interests of both copyright holders and alleged infringers, elevate the risk of power rent-seeking behavior, and waste judicial resources. For instance, when addressing the defense of copyright misuse, the first-instance court in Jilin case did not clearly draw the line between proper exercise of the right and misuse of the right, but directly concluded that the conduct of copyright holder was appropriate.

The standard for determining copyright misuse, which involves anti-competition conducts, is not unified or reasonable. In Jilin University Press case, it seemed that the court defined copyright misuse as a violation of Anti-Monopoly Law. However, in Beijing Jingdiao Technology case, the court merely included analysis of anti-competition in considering the copyright misuse.

Because Jilin case was decided in and Beijing case in , such inconsistency was probably caused by the fact that Anti-Monopoly Law was not enacted until Judging from the decision in Jilin case, it is possible that courts have been leaning towards requiring the extent to which the conduct in question has violated Anti-Monopoly Law to establish copyright misuse.

If this is true, namely what legislature and judiciary want, then there will be further concerns arising out of dual mechanism of civil litigations and administrative enforcement.

To conclude on this issue, there should be firstly a unified view over whether a violation of Anti-Monopoly Law is a prerequisite for a copyright misuse or not, and secondly a more reasonable view, which is the determination of copyright misuse is independent of that of violation of Anti-Monopoly Law. Certain copyright misuse conduct cannot be governed by the current system. Recall the scenario in Video Pipeline case.

Although the court rejected the copyright misuse argument after concluding that the conduct by the copyright holder was not sufficiently significant and that the fair use doctrine could provide protection, it adopted an approach of analyzing copyright misuse different from that based on anti-competition conducts. What if the copyright holder did obstruct public expression to a significant extent and the alleged infringer cannot be protected by the fair use doctrine in China?

With rapid development of the copyright industry, there will always be misuse by copyright holders which contradicts the purpose of the Copyright Law but cannot be prohibited by existing provisions. This is especially true when the conduct is not related to anti-competition. Secondly, consider setting up a standard for determining whether there is a copyright misuse, abolish the requirement of violating the Anti-Monopoly Law, and rather adopt the analysis of mere anti-competition behavior.

Last but not least, apart from the misuses involving anti-competition, the copyright misuse doctrine should also include an approach to identifying misuse on the basis of public policy considerations, namely, by analyzing whether the conducts hinder the promotion of cultural creation contrary to the legislative purpose of Copyright Law. See Lasercomb Am. Reynolds , F. DGI Techs. Its purpose is to ensure that copyright holder exercises control over the work expression, but the control will not extend to what is unprotected by Copyright Law.

So it shares common logic with Fair Use. This is the reason why Fair Use Doctrine is discussed here. This suggests that China categorizes intellectual property rights as civil rights. A surpass of basic principles of Civil Law over copyright calls for a high quality legal interpretation, in order to achieve consistency in judiciary.

Mu Deyuan et el. Your email address will not be published. Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. Skip to content. Lasercomb Am. Subsequent developments in Video Pipeline, Inc.