20-20 Design Court Battle with ProKitchen Continues
It’s not a “new” news story, but I’m still surprised at how many people in our industry haven’t heard about it. Back in November of 2007, 20-20 Technologies served Real View, the makers of ProKitchen design software, a cease-and-desist letter claiming that Real View had engaged in “blatant violation of its intellectual property rights.”
Real View responded to by filing a complaint seeking a judgment that it has not infringed on 20-20′s copyrights. 20-20 then filed counterclaims for copyright infringement, trade dress infringement, unfair competition, intentional interference with advantageous relations, blah blah blah.
At the core of the argument is copyright infringement. Before proceeding to trial, the Court held a preliminary hearing. On Real View’s side was Daniel H. Abbott, an instructor at Southern Maine Community College for Architectural & Engineering Design and on 20-20’s side was Dr. Randall Davis, a professor of Computer Science and Engineering at MIT. This guy even wrote a position paper for Princeton University at the Microsoft Intellectual Property Conference in 2005. He’s got creds, as they say.
Well there’s no denying who hired the big guns on this case. Wow.
20-20 alleges that Real View copied 54 elements of its program – ranging from screen layout, buttons, menus, drag and drop methods of placing cabinets, and other minutiae. Real View admitted that while developing ProKitchen, it downloaded a copy of 20-20 Design. Further, Real View explained that “it made ProKitchen as close to 20-20 Design as possible.”
Well, they may not be original, but at least they’re honest.
The overall case is relatively boring to read, but you can research it at the US District COurt of Massachusetts to help you fall asleep tonight. The more interesting notes are the from the Court’s findings, which may draw wide implications for many CAD software companies in our industry.
In February of this year, the Court found that many of the elements 20-20 identified did not merit copyright protection. Good news for CAD companies. However, they did find that many of the compilations as viewed on the screen display can be protected. For example, the Court found that a particular dialog box (the one that enables a designer to specify attributes of a cabinet and show a preview) was copyrightable.
As a funny side note, one of the 54 items identified was the “idiosyncratic sequence of mouse clicks through which a user could draw walls”. Surprisingly, 20-20 did not try to seek copyright protection on program crashes and freezes, which I always thought were relatively idiosyncratic too. I think they missed a good opportunity on that one because if they succeed, they could then sue Microsoft for billions.
Established players rarely sue startups – that’s why this is surprising. It’s much better to look at building or buying because courtroom battles don’t add value, they just consume cash. But a growing number of cabinet manufacturers were embracing ProKitchen after Planit was purchased. My guess is they were probably denting 20-20’s market share noticeably.
Did 20-20 slap them with a lawsuit to unfairly slow them down? Or is Real View no different than China by copying a good idea and executing it better?
