The U.S. Sixth Cicuit Appeals Court last Tuesday reversed a lower court
decision and jeopardized the attempt of Lexmark, the printer maker, to use DMCA
1201 to bar third-party makers of laser toner cartridges from competing with it.
The Court overturned a preliminary injunction that disallowed Static Control
Components (SCC) from producing control chips that enable third-party toner cartridges
to work with Lexmark printers.
Lexmark's litigation is an egregious abuse of DMCA 1201, and it is about time that federal
judges saw sense and treated it with the contempt it deserves. The
judges in the case found that a piece of software used to process the loading of
toner cartridges did not qualify as a copyrighted work, because it the "ideas"
it "expressed" were too trivial to be considered "creative," and thus fell on
the wrong side of the idea-expression dichotomy that is central to copyright
law. Therefore, SCC's reverse engineering of Lexmark's control chip does
not qualify as "circumvention" technology.
One of the judges in the case, in a concurring opinion that accompanied the
decision, stated that the decision should have gone further and that in
general, this type of use of DMCA 1201 should not be allowed. Judge
Gilbert Merritt said: "If
we were to adopt Lexmark's reading of the statute, manufacturers could
potentially create monopolies for replacement parts simply by using similar, but
more creative, lock-out codes. Automobile manufacturers, for example, could
control the entire market of replacement parts for their vehicles by including
lock-out chips. Congress did not intend to allow the DMCA to be used offensively
in this manner, but rather only sought to reach those who circumvented
protective measures 'for the purpose' of pirating works protected by the
copyright statute. Unless a plaintiff can show that a defendant circumvented
protective measures for such a purpose, its claim should not be allowed to go
forward."
Unfortunately, this case is not over yet; only
the District Court's preliminary injuction has been overturned. But let's
hope that this ludicrous case follows the same path as the Chamberlain vs.
Skylink case, in which similar claims to Lexmark's were made by a vendor of
garage door openers. A federal appeals court rightly
affirmed a lower court's rejection of Chamberlain's DMCA-based complaint
just two months ago. Let Judge Merritt's words serve as a warning to
others -- including StorageTek, which is pursuing
DMCA-based litigation in order to create a monopoly on the business of
repairing its own disk drives.
Events
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