''Lotus Dev. Corp. v. Borland Int'l, Inc.'', 516 U.S. 233 (1996), is a

United States Supreme Court The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that turn on question ...

case that tested the extent of software copyright.. The lower court had held that copyright does not extend to the

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

of a

computer program A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to Execution (computing), execute. It is one component of software, which also includes software documentation, documentation and other intangibl ...

, such as the text and layout of menus. Due to the recusal of one justice, the Supreme Court decided the case with an eight-member bench split evenly, leaving the lower court's decision affirmed but setting no national precedent.

Background information

Borland Borland Software Corporation was a computing technology company founded in 1983 by Niels Jensen, Ole Henriksen, Mogens Glad, and Philippe Kahn. Its main business was developing and selling software development and software deployment products. B ...

released a

spreadsheet A spreadsheet is a computer application for computation, organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form. Spreadsheets were developed as computerized analogs of paper accounting worksheets. The program operates on data entered in c ...

product,

Quattro Pro Quattro Pro is a spreadsheet program developed by Borland and now sold by Alludo, most often as part of Alludo's WordPerfect Office suite. Characteristics Historically, Quattro Pro used keyboard commands close to those of Lotus 1-2-3. While ...

, with a compatibility mode in which its

menu In a restaurant, the menu is a list of food and beverages offered to the customer. A menu may be à la carte – which presents a list of options from which customers choose, often with prices shown – or table d'hôte, in which case a pre-est ...

imitated

Lotus 1-2-3 Lotus 1-2-3 is a discontinued spreadsheet program from Lotus Software (later part of IBM). It was the first killer application of the IBM PC, was hugely popular in the 1980s, and significantly contributed to the success of IBM PC-compatibles ...

, a competing product. None of the

source code In computing, source code, or simply code or source, is a plain text computer program written in a programming language. A programmer writes the human readable source code to control the behavior of a computer. Since a computer, at base, only ...

machine code In computer programming, machine code is computer code consisting of machine language instructions, which are used to control a computer's central processing unit (CPU). For conventional binary computers, machine code is the binaryOn nonb ...

that generated the menus was copied, but the names of the commands and the organization of those commands into a hierarchy were virtually identical. Quattro Pro also contained a "Key Reader" feature, which allowed it to execute Lotus 1-2-3 keyboard macros. To support this feature, Quattro Pro's code contained a copy of Lotus's menu hierarchy in which each command was represented by its first letter instead of its entire name. Borland CEO Philippe Kahn took the case to the software development community arguing that Lotus's position would stifle innovation and damage the future of software development. The vast majority of the software development community supported Borland's position.

District Court case

Lotus filed suit in the

United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts The United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts (in case citations, D. Mass.) is the United States district court, federal district court whose Jurisdiction (area), territorial jurisdiction is the Commonwealth (U.S. state), C ...

on July 2, 1990, claiming that the structure of the menus was

copyright A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, ...

ed by Lotus. The

district court District courts are a category of courts which exists in several nations, some call them "small case court" usually as the lowest level of the hierarchy. These courts generally work under a higher court which exercises control over the lower co ...

ruled that Borland had infringed Lotus's copyright. The ruling was based in part on the fact that an alternative satisfactory menu structure could be designed. For example, the "Quit" command could be changed to "Exit". Borland immediately removed the Lotus-based menu system from Quattro Pro, but retained support for its "Key Reader" feature, and Lotus filed a supplemental claim against this feature. A district court held that this also constituted copyright infringement.

Circuit Court case

Borland appealed the decision of the district court arguing that the menu hierarchy is a "method of operation", which is not copyrightable according to 17 U.S.C. § 102(b). The

United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit The United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit (in case citations, 1st Cir.) is a federal court with appellate jurisdiction over the district courts in the following districts: * District of Maine * District of Massachusetts ...

reversed the district court's decision, agreeing with Borland's legal theory that considered the menu hierarchy a "method of operation". The court agreed with the district court that an alternative menu hierarchy could be devised, but argued that despite this, the menu hierarchy is an uncopyrightable "method of operation".

We hold that the Lotus menu command hierarchy is an uncopyrightable “method of operation.” The Lotus menu command hierarchy provides the means by which users control and operate Lotus 1–2–3. If users wish to copy material, for example, they use the “Copy” command. If users wish to print material, they use the “Print” command. Users must use the command terms to tell the computer what to do. Without the menu command hierarchy, users would not be able to access and control, or indeed make use of, Lotus 1–2–3's functional capabilities.

The court made an analogy between the menu hierarchy and the arrangement of buttons on a VCR. The buttons are used to control the playback of a video tape, just as the menu commands are used to control the operations of Lotus 1-2-3. Since the buttons are essential to operating the VCR, their layout cannot be copyrighted. Likewise, the menu commands, including the textual labels and the hierarchical layout, are essential to operating Lotus 1-2-3. The court also considered the impact of their decision on users of software. If menu hierarchies were copyrightable, users would be required to learn how to perform the same operation in a different way for every program, which the court finds "absurd". Additionally, all macros would have to be re-written for each different program, which places an undue burden on users.

Concurring opinion

Judge Michael Boudin wrote a

concurring opinion In law, a concurring opinion is in certain legal systems a written opinion by one or more judges of a court which agrees with the decision made by the Majority opinion, majority of the court, but states different (or additional) reasons as the bas ...

for this case. In this opinion, he discusses the costs and benefits of copyright protection, as well as the potential similarity of software copyright protection to

patent A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...

protection. He argues that software is different from creative works, which makes it difficult to apply copyright law to software. His opinion also considers the theory that Borland's use of the Lotus menu is "privileged". That is, because Borland copied the menu for a legitimate purpose of compatibility, its use should be allowed. This decision, if issued by the majority of the court, would have been narrower in scope than the "method of operations" decision. Copying a menu hierarchy would be allowed in some circumstances, and disallowed in others.

Supreme Court case

Lotus petitioned the

for a writ of certiorari. In a per curiam opinion, the Supreme Court affirmed the circuit court's judgment due to an evenly divided court, with Justice Stevens recusing. Because the Court split evenly, it affirmed the First Circuit's decision without discussion and did not establish any national precedent on the copyright issue. Lotus's petition for a rehearing by the full court was denied. By the time the lawsuit ended, Borland had sold Quattro Pro to

Novell Novell, Inc. () was an American software and services company headquartered in Provo, Utah, that existed from 1980 until 2014. Its most significant product was the multi-platform network operating system known as NetWare. Novell technolog ...

, and

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational corporation and technology company, technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became influential in the History of personal computers#The ear ...

's Excel spreadsheet had emerged as the main challenger to Lotus 1-2-3.

Impact

The ''Lotus'' decision establishes a distinction in copyright law between the interface of a software product and its implementation. The implementation is subject to copyright. The public interface may also be subject to copyright to the extent that it contains expression (for example, the appearance of an

icon An icon () is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, in the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, Catholic Church, Catholic, and Lutheranism, Lutheran churches. The most common subjects include Jesus, Mary, mother of ...

). However, the set of available operations and the mechanics of how they are activated are not copyrightable. This standard allows software developers to create competing versions of copyrighted software products without infringing the copyright. See

software clone In computing, a clone is computer hardware, hardware or software that is designed to function in exactly the same way as another system. A specific subset of clones are remakes (or remades), which are revivals of old, obsolete, or discontinued p ...

for infringement and compliance cases. ''Lotus v. Borland'' has been used as a lens through which to view the controversial case in '' Oracle America, Inc. v. Google, Inc.'', dealing with the copyrightability of software

application programming interfaces An application programming interface (API) is a connection between computers or between computer programs. It is a type of software interface, offering a service to other pieces of software. A document or standard that describes how to build su ...

(APIs) and interoperability of software. Software APIs are designed to allow developers to insure compatibility, but should APIs be found to be copyrightable, that could drastically affect the development of software, as the threat of litigation for building interoperability (a core feature of computing, as it has developed over the decades of worldwide use) would present a

chilling effect In a legal context, a chilling effect is the inhibition or discouragement of the legitimate exercise of natural and legal rights by the threat of legal sanction. A chilling effect may be caused by legal actions such as the passing of a law, th ...

and coerce the establishment of walled gardens around islands of mutually-incompatible software ecosystems, causing millions of man-hours to be lost in re-implementation and quality assurance testing of the same software across multiple concurrent systems, leading to divergent software development paths and a drastically increased attack surface for potential illicit exploitation.

References

External links

17 U.S.C. § 102(b)
*
Perspective: Lotus Development Corp. v. Borland International, Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly, April 1995
{{DEFAULTSORT:Lotus Dev. Corp. V. Borland Int'l, Inc. United States Supreme Court cases United States copyright case law 1996 in United States case law United States computer case law Borland IBM Spreadsheet software United States Supreme Court cases of the Rehnquist Court Tie votes of the United States Supreme Court Copyrightability case law