Concept originality software: Supreme Court judgment (judgment of 12 January 2007, n. 581)
Interesting ruling by the Court of Cassation confirmed the previous two judgments of the Court and the Court of Appeal of Milan in a case related to a contract for the sale of software for industrial automation in the petrochemical industry with exclusive in favor of a licensee company , which had objected to the licensor and connected to the sale of the software to its competitor.
Both the Court that the Court of Appeal, also on the basis of the findings of the expert witness, had found that the computer program which was the subject of the contract of sale in use was to be considered different from that subsequently reworked and then sold to a third competitor of the first licensee. The Supreme Court has judged the correct logical procedure of the courts of legal merit.
It is worth retracing the critical step of the judgment of the Supreme Court: "It is certainly acceptable, in general and abstract terms, the premise of the applicant's reasoning: that the protection of copyright in computer programs (the so-called software, which is the creative substance of computer programs), like that concerning any other work, postulates the requirement of originality. It also raises the need for them to determine whether the work (ie the program) is or is not the result of a ' processing the original creative than previous works, but with two important caveats: that creativity and originality exist even if the work is made up of simple ideas and concepts, including the intellectual heritage of people with experience in the proper matter of the work itself as long as formulated and organized in a personal and independent of the previous and the consistency in practice this self-supply is the subject of an assessment intended to lead to a judgment of fact, as such sindacabile in the legitimacy only for defects of motivation (see, among others, on the subject, the Supreme Court 20925/05 and 11953/93). "
That said, according to the Supreme Court, in the case came to their attention, "the appeals court, referring specifically to the indications provided by the technical consultant, has justifiably argued their own judgment regarding the originality of the program that the subject of the agreement in issue. has in fact made clear that, while it is true that "all software products that solve the same application requirement (in this case: controlling the load of the vehicles in the oil depots) have an architecture base that is common to most of the control systems of industrial processes ", the other side is also true that this" does not prevent to identify the specificity of a single product, because the innovation lies in the ability to adapt l ' application architecture to the specific case, and technological environment "(judgment, p. 26). Precisely these application profiles, the motivated decision of the court on the merits, constitute the elements of significant differentiation between the entrusted program in use and its later revised to a third-party customer; elements that the contested judgment does not fail to supply analytical, adding quite plausibly, on logical and vice versa has no relevance in the two cases the identity of the user documentation attached to the program: as this and not that, is the characteristic of the work granted in use.
In substance, the specificity of a software program which also present a basic architecture common to other systems resides in the ability to adapt the application architecture to the case and technological environment specific.
22/01/2007
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Translated via software
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Source:
Italian version of ReteArchitetti.it