Dais Studio Pty Ltd v Bullet Creative Pty Ltd [2007] FCA 2054
The Federal Court has handed down a decision today on Dais Studio Pty Ltd v Bullet Creative Pty Ltd concerning a claim of copyright infringement, breach of contract and confidence and breach of the Corporations Act for improper use of information gained under employment.
The decision considers individual files within a computer program. Jessup J at 39 provides:
The definition requires me to accept as a computer program any set of statements or instructions which is used to bring about a certain result. I consider that the instructions in the table file and the editor file were a set within the terms of the definition. Those files were discrete manageable entities. Either could be downloaded and used as such. Either could be included in, or excluded from, a CMS, depending on the developer’s requirements. Each added functionality, in the sense that results were made possible by its inclusion. Each file (or either file as the occasion required) was sent as an entity to the user’s computer to function co-operatively with the browser’s software. The instructions on each file were related by function, by location and by utilisation.
On any view, those instructions constituted a set. Further, the results for the bringing about of which the files were used were recognisable and definable. In the case of the table file, for instance, one result might be the highlighting of a line entry in a table. Another result might be the re-ordering of the lines in the table. For each result to be brought about required the participation of HTML software on the browser; but it required also the participation of the relevant instructions in the table file. That is to say, in the words of the definition, the bringing about of the result in question required the use of those instructions. And the same conclusion could be drawn, mutatis mutandis, in the case of the instructions in the editor file.
Dais Studio Pty Ltd v Bullet Creative Pty Ltd [2007] FCA 2054