Module 11: Intellectual Property Rights

Whelan vs. Jaslow case
Court Ruling: Guilty
Basis of Court Ruling: Structure (sequence and organization) of a software program can be protected by copyright.

Personal Ruling: Not Guilty
Basis of Personal Ruling:
Usually the code of a software package or program is not available to the public, and it would be difficult to acquire unless it’s an insider’s job.

Because both Whelan and Jaslow engage in the same dental related business, they may have similar software requirements. The fact that Whelan did not copy any part of the code, and implemented every software functional requirement on their own, for me they did not do anything morally bad.

Computer Associates vs. Altai case
Court Ruling: Not Guilty
Basis of Court Ruling: Structure (sequence and organization) of a software program cannot be protected by copyright.

Personal Ruling: Guilty
Basis of Personal Ruling:
An Altai employee copied 30% of the code from Computer Associates. This means that he partly stole his code from Computer Associates. Copying partly a software code is still stealing, and thereby, such kind of act is morally wrong.

Microsoft vs. Apple case
Court Ruling: Not Guilty
Basis of Court Ruling: Microsoft and Apple GUI presentations were not virtually identical

Personal Ruling: Not Guilty
Basis of Personal Ruling:
Even if there is great similarities in the GUI presentations of Microsoft and Apple, Microsoft did not copy any code to make the presentation layer similar to Apple. There is no evidence of copying of codes involved. Therefore, there is no stealing of codes. No act of moral infringement. Microsoft may have gotten some ideas from Apple, in terms of functionalities. This may have caused the great similarities with Apple’s GUI. However, Microsoft implemented their functional requirements without copying from Apple’s implementation.

Borland Quattro vs. Lotus
Court Ruling: Split
Basis of Court Ruling: In Supreme Court, no decision made to whether there is copyright infringement

Personal Ruling: Guilty
Basis of Personal Ruling:
Even if Borland Quattro’s interface is different from Lotus 1-2-3, Borland copied the Lotus menu hierarchy. For me, although this is just the menu hierarchy, the fact that it was copied from Lotus, this is still stealing. When you steal, the amount does not matter. It is still morally not right.