Legal Eagles

Football Dataco Versus Yahoo UK

Football Dataco Limited ("Dataco"), a company who collates and sells football fixture lists, had a busy 2010 bringing actions against various companies who they alleged infringed its copyright and database rights. In one case Dataco sued YAHOO! UK in the English Court of Appeal referred some questions to the European Court of Justice dealing with how Article 3 of the Database Directive should be interpreted in relation to football fixture lists. The decision in this case could also affect the gaming sector.

Section 3 of the Database Directive gives a database author rights in the database, however the question referred was whether a football fixture list was one which, by reason of a selection or arrangement of the contents, constituted the author's own intellectual creation. If it did, the data is protected. Considering the types of data available for use in creating games and how that data is compiled, an adverse finding against Football Dataco could mean that the data providers also by analogy have their rights eroded and would lose ability to protect their data from being used by developers.

SAS Institute Versus The World Programming

SAS are a market leader in statistical analysis software and WPL created a software product and emulated much of the SAS functionality as closely as possible. What is interesting is that WPL did not have access to any of the source code, so a claim for direct copyright infringement could not be made out. SAS then argued, amongst a few other things, that WPL had infringed the Software Directive and the Information Society Directive (aka The Copyright Directive). Various questions were then referred to the European Court of Justice.

The ECJ must now give a ruling around the controversial issues on copyright protection for computer software as set out in the Software Directive. The scope of the questions to the ECJ include whether or not programming languages, screen interfaces and functional aspects of the programme are excluded from the protection of the Software Directive.

Further, they must answer whether or not someone who emulates software function in a rival piece of software infringes the original software. The outcome could have a profound impact on developers and publishers.

Depending on the mood of ECJ and the ruling it gives, it could create an opportunity for developers to easily emulate competitors' software and systems and other developers could be open to competition without much recourse to protect the investment they have made in their games.

Article written by Brett Farrell, an associate, and Katie Hill, a trainee, at Barlow Robbins LLP.