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A federal appellate court has considered whether a software company which provides software support to local municipalities could bring a copyright infringement lawsuit against a company owned by a multiple listing service when the company attempted to obtain property tax assessment information contained in a software program developed by the software company.
WIREdata, Inc. ("WIRE"), a company owned by Multiple Listing Services, Inc. (a regional REALTOR® owned multiple listing service in Wisconsin), obtained data about properties in its service area by paying fees to various municipalities. However, three municipalities ("Municipalities") refused to provide this information to WIRE because they had license agreements with Assessment Technologies of WI, LLC ("Vendor"). The Vendor had developed a computer program named "Market Drive" ("Program"), which allows tax assessors to enter information about various properties into specific fields. The Program uses the property data to populate 456 data fields, which allows the municipalities the ability to search the information gathered by the tax assessors using the Program. The Vendor had copyrighted the Program.
WIRE brought lawsuits against the Municipalities in order to force them to share their data. The lawsuits were based on a Wisconsin law, which requires such public records information be available to anyone who is willing to pay the copying fee. Following the filing of WIRE's lawsuits, the Vendor brought a lawsuit against WIRE alleging copyright infringement and theft of trade secrets, and sought to prevent WIRE from forcing the Municipalities to allow access to their databases. The trial court ruled in favor of the Vendor and entered an injunction preventing WIRE from accessing the Municipalities databases, basing its decision on the copyright claim alone. WIRE appealed the trial court's ruling.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit reversed the lower court's ruling. The court first reviewed the relevant law regarding the copyrightability of electronic databases. The court found that electronic databases composed of otherwise noncopyrightable facts may be copyrighted so long as the entire work demonstrates "enough originality to enable a work to be distinguished from similar works that are in the public domain." But the court also found that the Vendor's copyright only covered the Program, not the data which the Program used to populate the various data fields. Since WIRE was not seeking to copy the Program but rather simply seeking the data contained in the Program, the court ruled that the Vendor's copyright infringement claims were baseless.
The court's opinion found that there were four ways in which WIRE could obtain the tax assessment data from the Municipalities without violating the Vendor's copyright. One possibility is to have the municipalities extract the data itself using the Program and turn it over to WIRE. A second possibility is to use Microsoft Access to extract the information, since that was the database that the Program populated with data. Alternatively, the Vendor could allow programmers from WIRE to use WIRE's computers to extract the data from the Program. The court went on to say that the Vendor would lose this case even if the raw data could not be extracted without making a copy of the Program. Federal case law permits the so-called "intermediate copying" of a software program when such copying is the only way that a company can make or sell a noninfringing product and the copying is not using the copied information for any other purpose.
The court rejected the Vendor's argument that since the data was also available in handwritten form, WIRE did not need to access the Program in order to obtain the data. First, the court found that testimony showed that this was not the case, as some of the data was only available via the Program. But more importantly, the court ruled that since the Vendor did not own or have any legal interest in the data it collected, it could not prevent WIRE's copying of the data. The court also rejected the Vendor's argument that WIRE's actions violated the licensing agreement the Municipalities had entered into with the Vendor. The court found this argument irrelevant, since WIRE was not a party to those agreements. Thus, the court reversed the lower court and ordered the lower court to dismiss the copyright infringement claim.
Assessment Technologies of WI, LLC v. WIREdata, Inc., No. 03-2061, 2003 WL 22783823 (7th Cir. Nov 25, 2003). [This is a citation to a Westlaw document. Westlaw is a subscription, online legal research service. If an official reporter citation should become available for this case, the citation will be updated to reflect this information].
Editor's Note: Special thanks to Peter Shuttleworth of the Multiple Listing Service, Inc., for alerting Legal Affairs to this decision.