Ninth Circuit Gets It: Interoperability Isn’t an Automatic First Step to Liability

<

div class=”field field–name-body field–type-text-with-summary field–label-hidden”>

<

div class=”field__items”>

<

div class=”field__item even”>

A federal appeals court just gave software developers, and users, an early holiday present, holding that software updates aren’t necessarily “derivative,” for purposes of copyright law, just because they are designed to interoperate the software they update.

This sounds kind of obscure, so let’s cut through the legalese. Lots of developers build software designed to interoperate with preexisting works. This kind of interoperability is crucial to innovation, particularly in a world where a small number of companies control so many essential tools and platforms. If users want to be able to repair, improve, and secure their devices, they must be able to rely on third parties to help. Trouble is, Big Tech companies want to be able to control (and charge for) every possible use of the devices and software they “sell” you – and they won’t hesitate to use the law to enforce that control. 

Courts shouldn’t assist, but unfortunately a federal district court did just that in the latest iteration of Oracle v. Rimini. Rimini provides support to improve the use and security of Oracle products, so customers don’t have to depend entirely on Oracle itself . Oracle doesn’t want this kind of competition, so it sued Rimini for copyright infringement, arguing that a software update Rimini developed was a “derivative work” because it was intended to interoperate with Oracle’s software, even though the update didn’t use any of Oracle’s copyrightable code. Derivative works are typically things like a movie based on a novel, or a translation of that novel. Here, the only “derivative” aspect was that Rimini’s code was designed to interact with Oracle’s code.  
 
Unfortunately, the district court initially sided with Oracle, setting a dangerous precedent. If a work is derivative, it may infringe the copyright in the preexisting work from which it, well, derives. For decades, software developers have relied, correctly, on the settled view that a work is not deriv

[…]
Content was cut in order to protect the source.Please visit the source for the rest of the article.