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| Lotus Development Corporation v. Borland International, Inc. | ||||||
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| Argued January 8, 1996 Decided January 16, 1996 |
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| Holding | ||||||
| The appeals court's decision was affirmed. | ||||||
| Court membership | ||||||
| Chief Justice: William Rehnquist Associate Justices: John Paul Stevens, Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, David Souter, Clarence Thomas, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer |
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| Case opinions | ||||||
| Per curiam. Stevens took no part in the consideration or decision of the case. |
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| Laws applied | ||||||
| 17 U.S. C. section 102(b) | ||||||
Lotus Development Corporation v. Borland International, Inc., 516 U.S. 233 (1995), is a United States federal court case that tested the extent of software copyright.
Borland released a spreadsheet product, Quattro Pro, that had a mode in which its menu system imitated that of Lotus 1-2-3, a competing spreadsheet. Lotus sued in June 1990, claiming that the structure of the menus was Lotus's copyrighted intellectual property. A district court ruled that Borland had infringed Lotus's copyright. Borland immediately removed the Lotus-based menu system from Quattro Pro, but retained support for Lotus 1-2-3 keyboard macros based on the menu system, and Lotus filed a supplemental claim against this feature.
The United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit reversed the district court, finding that the menu system was a "method of operation", like the arrangement of buttons on a video cassette recorder, and therefore not subject to copyright. Lotus petitioned the United States Supreme Court for a writ of certiorari. The Supreme Court affirmed the circuit court's opinion in a 4-4 anonymous tie vote, with Justice Stevens recusing. 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, and Microsoft's Excel spreadsheet had emerged as the main challenger to Lotus 1-2-3.
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). However, the set of available operations and the mechanics of how they are activated are not copyrightable. This standard allows software developers to create original clones of copyrighted software products without infringing the copyright.
Borland was represented in the lawsuit by Gary Reback, an attorney with Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, and by David Hayes, a copyright expert with Fenwick & West LLP. Intel, Digital Equipment Corporation, Xerox, and the Gates Rubber Company filed amicus curiae briefs in support of Lotus.
