Copyright Talk

ZDNet Asia is reporting that a college in the Phillipines has sued Microsoft for copyright infringement.

Yes, I wrote that correctly. The college claims that Microsoft bought a license to distribute a limited number of copies of a manual for Windows XP that the college wrote. However, the college alleges that Microsoft actually distributed a substantially larger number of copies than it had licensed.

This is interesting for a couple of reasons. One, it highlights the fact that subject matter is not copyrightable. The college wrote a manual about Windows XP. Although the college clearly has no claim to copyright in the software itself, copyright does not in any way prohibit the college - or anyone else, for that matter - from writing about the software and holding the copyright to that writing. However, this is not always true with regard to fictional characters. Sometimes, a character may be protected by copyright, and so writing another book about that character might cause copyright infringement questions.

The second thing about this story that I thought was really interesting is the irony of having a large corporation, which spends massive amounts of time and resources on the protection of its intellectual property, be accused of failing to pay close attention to the copyright of the material it uses. Now, in this case, there’s apparently no question that Microsoft started out handling the material appropriately. It determined that it wanted to reproduce and distribute the manual, and it then bought a license allowing it to do so. But after that initial distribution, it somehow failed to properly keep track of what it had a right to do. I suspect the situation was compounded by the fact that the manual was actually about one of it’s own products, which would have made it easy for employees to assume that Microsoft owned the copyright. But the bottom line is that if the allegations in the lawsuit are true, this is a very good example of how complicated keeping track of rights can be. Even those who make a living tracking their own intellectual property can get confused.