copyright infringement question

Sadhunathan Nadesan sadhu at castandcrew.com
Mon Apr 14 18:45:03 EDT 2008


Greetings, venerable collegues,

Would you have a few minutes to give me your brief opinion on a
copyright/intellectual property infringement question?  There is a
difference of opinion at our company and I'm seeking some outside
perspective.

Or maybe, refer me to some URL?  Any help gratefully acknowledged
in advance.

The issue is, in developing a new software program to compete with other
companies that already offer such a program, what is acceptable with
respect to using the existing competitor's product?

It is clear that we can't legally steal their code, but can we
reverse engineer their product's basic features as long as those are
not proprietary features, and as long as we don't copy their look and
feel exactly?  For example, take IE and Firefox - both do many of the
same things, but in a slightly different way.  My understanding is,
you cannot copyright an idea - but you can copyright the expression of
an idea. This means it's ok to build a better browser as long as you
don't steal code or copy look at feel too closely.  Reverse engineering
is legal.  Agree?  I think in house we agree on that.

Next question is less clear.  Suppose our competitor has lots of
information about their product on their web site, including screen shots,
descriptions of features, and even downloadable demonstration versions.
What is acceptable when we are talking to potential software consultancy
firms that we might hire to build our own product.  Can we say, take a
look at the competitor's web site?  That gives an idea of what we want but
of course, ours will be different and better.  One opinion in house says,
no, we cannot do this, we could be sued for that.  The other opinion
says, there is nothing illegal about it, we are not stealing anything
it's a freely available download on the net, and it's the fastest way
to give an idea to vendors of what we want.  In fact, we need them to
see it to make sure ours is not too close a copy.

What do you think?

Next question is an extension of this:  suppose we make a video clip
of a certain behavior within the competitor's product - it's nothing
extraordinary, it's just difficult to explain in words and even in a
series of jpegs, but, an mpeg says 1000+ words in a few seconds of motion.
It's not patentable behavior, just hard to describe without seeing it,
and we want it to be the same way in our product.   We could build it
so as to show people (if we had someone available), whereas, we really
want our vendor to build it (or better yet, proclaim, "we have that
out of the box in our toolkit").  It could be the small thing that
really effects the project cost.  So again, one opinion in house says,
this is not right, we cannot do it, it's illegal to make that video
clip and share it, and another opinion says, it's perfectly legal to
make movies of anything in public, including demo software in action,
peope do it on their cell phones and post it to youtube by the millions.
We are just showing a concept, not stealing anything.

Your opinion?

And/or, is there any site you might refer me to which would have legal
opinions on these matters?

Thanks,
Sadhu



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