William Patry reports that Gregory Aharonian failed in his attempt to have American courts declare software not protected under copyright.
Japanese and European copyright law expressly acknowledge copyright protection for software. American law is the same, though it relies on precedents cited in the opinion.
The plaintiff wanted this declaration since he intends to build a prior art database for software patents.
While Mr. Aharonian lost this round, he might still be able to go ahead with his project.
All he needs is to hope that Google wins their lawsuit and building a "search database" is recognized as fair use. If Google can copy millions of books into their database, surely Aharonian can copy a couple of source code listings into his search database.
So this case is exhibit A for Google's opponents when pointing out that giving Google the right to build search databases would obviously mean that everyone else would have the same right.
Posted by Karl-Friedrich Lenz at January 6, 2006 04:09 PM