Software Scan

The President's Column

Facebook just got hit with a $500 judgement for nonliteral software copyright infringement in ZeniMax v. Facebook. What is nonliteral software copyight infringement? Read my article in this month's Scanning IP section of the SAFE newsletter.

In the Scanning the Literature section you can read my interview about software forensics processes and tools by Scholastica.

Send me your comments and critiques. I'm always interested in hearing from you.

Regards,

Bob Zeidman
President, SAFE Corporation

Scanning IP

Facebook, Oculus, ZeniMax, and Nonliteral Copying of Code

Just last week, Facebook was spanked with a $500 million court judgement for non-literal infringement of software copyright. Even for Facebook, that’s a lot of money. Though less than the $4 billion that plaintiff ZeniMax had been asking for, it’s a large chunk of the $2 billion that Facebook paid for Oculus in 2014. The case was ZeniMax v. Oculus, and the jury decided that Facebook had infringed on the copyright of ZeniMax’s software source code. According to the jury, Oculus co-founder Palmer Luckey and CTO John Carmack violated a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) with ZeniMax when they all had worked together to develop the Oculus Rift, the virtual reality headset that caught the attention of Facebook.

Read more here.

For background on the case, read this article by Steve Brachmann. 

Using Tools for Software Analysis in IP Litigation

We live in a digital world and as more inventions and institutions become subject to computer programming intellectual property law is being applied to code. Given the extensive nature of programming languages and code execution, analyzing and comparing source code - lines of code commands to be compiled into a computer program - or complete software is a tedious manual task and one subject to human error. As a result, new tools for assessing coded materials in IP litigation are emerging.

CodeSuite^® & CodeSuite-LT^®
Sophisticated sets of tools for analyzing software source code and object code including:

BitMatch^®
Check binary object code for plagiarism.

CodeCLOC^®
Measure software IP changes between versions of a program.

CodeCross^®
Cross check source code for plagiarism.

CodeDiff^®
Compare source code to find differences and measure changes.

CodeMatch^®
The premiere tool for pinpointing copied source code.

SourceDetective^®
Scour the Internet for plagiarized code.

CodeSuite-MP^®
Speed up your analysis on a multiprocessor system.

CodeGrid^®
Turbo charge your analysis on a supercomputer grid.

HTML Preprocessor™
Divide HTML pages into their basic elements for easier analysis.

Get Smart

SAFE offers training at our facility or yours or on the Web. Contact us to make arrangements:

MCLE credit in software IP

CodeSuite certification

Your New Office

Remember that you can have your own secure office at the SAFE facility for storing proprietary software, running CodeSuite, analyzing the results, and getting onsite support. We're located at

20863 Stevens Creek Blvd.
Suite 456
Cupertino, CA 95014
(408) 517-1167