POLITECNICO DI TORINO Repository ISTITUZIONALE SOFTWARE INTEROPERABILITY: Issues at the Intersection between Intellectual Property and Competition Policy Original SOFTWARE INTEROPERABILITY: Issues at the Intersection between Intellectual Property and Competition Policy / Morando, Federico. - (2009). Availability: This version is available at: 11583/2615059 since: 2015-07-16T15:01:26Z Publisher: Published DOI:10.6092/polito/porto/2615059 Terms of use: openAccess This article is made available under terms and conditions as specified in the corresponding bibliographic description in the repository Publisher copyright (Article begins on next page) 26 September 2021 Università degli Studi di Torino SOFTWARE INTEROPERABILITY Issues at the Intersection between Intellectual Property and Competition Policy Federico Morando Dottorato di Ricerca in Analisi Comparata dell’Economia, del Diritto e delle Istituzioni Codice del Settore Scientifico Disciplinare (SSD): IUS/02 Comparative Analysis of Institutions, Economics and Law (IEL) Università degli Studi di Torino SOFTWARE INTEROPERABILITY Issues at the Intersection between Intellectual Property and Competition Policy Federico Morando Dottorato di Ricerca in Analisi Comparata dell’Economia, del Diritto e delle Istituzioni (IEL) Comparative Analysis of Institutions, Economics and Law (IEL) Ciclo XXI Supervisors: Prof. Ben Depoorter Prof. Marco Ricolfi Candidate: Federico Morando Programme Coordinator: Prof. Giovanni B. Ramello Dipartimento di Economia “S. Cognetti de Martiis” Dipartimento di Scienze Economiche e Finanziarie “G. Prato” Dipartimento di Scienze Giuridiche Universiteit Gent SOFTWARE INTEROPERABILITY Issues at the Intersection between Intellectual Property and Competition Policy Federico Morando Doctoraat in de Rechten Thesis in Cotutelle a Valentina ACKNOWLEDGMENT Several people contributed, directly or indirectly, to the realization of this Ph.D. thesis. First of all, I am grateful to my supervisors, Prof. Ben Depoorter and Prof. Marco Ricolfi. I expected to find in them competent scholars and capable teachers, but I have been glad to find also excellent mentors and good friends. Moreover, I have been lucky enough to be guided by two scholars with different and frequently complementary approaches to investigation and analysis and to the academic world in general and this dramatically enriched my research experience. I would also like to express my thanks to Prof. Gianmaria Ajani and, with him, all the people who believed in the possibility of creating the IEL Ph.D., a doctoral course that I really enjoyed from any point of view and which allowed me to pursue interdisciplinary studies in an international context. I am confident that these and new committed people, now under the co-ordination of Prof. Giovanni B. Ramello, will be able to further improve the quality of this programme. Let me also acknowledge, in particular, the contribution to my thesis coming from the comments of Prof. Pierre Jean Benghozi and Prof. Pierre Garello. Furthermore, I would like to thank Prof. Boudewijn Bouckaert, the other Professors and the entire staff of the Centre for Advanced Studies in Law and Economics at the Law School of the Univesiteit Van Gent: I am especially grateful to Ms. Katelijne Verstichel for her valuable help in solving the myriad of small bureaucratic issues related to a thesis in cotutelle. This thesis also owes a lot to the members of two other academic groups. I would like to express my deep appreciation to my friends and colleagues at Bocconi University in Milan, for many fruitful discussions about the topics of this dissertation and about intellectual property and competition policy in general. I would like to mention, among them, Prof. Maria Lillà Montagnani, Prof. Paola Magnani and Prof. Federico Ghezzi. Moreover, I thank all the fellows of the NEXA Center for Internet & Society of the Politecnico di Torino and, in particular, Prof. Juan Carlos De Martin, co-director of the Center together with Prof. Marco Ricolfi. This wonderful group of enthusiast and committed scholars, researchers and practitioners, coming from various disciplines (including engineering, law, economics and management) provided me with several specific insights for my thesis and, more generally, convinced me of the value of a multidisciplinary approach, backed by a rigorous methodology. In addition, I am grateful to all my Ph.D fellows. Particularly, I wish to thank Enrico Bertacchini, with whom I spent many days in Ghent (and quite some evenings talking about law & economics in front of a Belgian beer), Branko Radulovic and Elisa Vecchione. The warmest thanks also go to my parents, who encouraged me to pursue my studies and always supported me. Last, but not least, I thank my wife Valentina for having made me the happiest man on Earth during the years of this dissertation and – I hope – during the rest of our lives. PAPER 1 - TABLE OF CONTENTS 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................................................................... 24 1.1. Plan of the paper ........................................................................................................................................... 27 2. Interoperability information: technical definitions and law & economics simplifications......................... 28 2.1. Access to interoperability information....................................................................................................... 29 2.1.1. Software reverse engineering (decompilation)................................................................................... 31 3. API specification versus implementation............................................................................................................. 36 3.1. Decisions of the European Commission adopting the specification/implementation dichotomy .. 38 3.2. Implementation v. specification: some more hints from US case law ................................................... 40 3.2.1. E.F. Johnson Co. v. Uniden Corp......................................................................................................... 40 3.2.2. CMAX/Cleveland v. UCR.................................................................................................................... 41 3.2.3. How to distinguish between copying ideas and expressions?.......................................................... 42 4. Investigating the legal status of interoperability information: US case law and doctrines......................... 44 4.1. The protection against copying of non-literal elements.......................................................................... 44 4.1.1. The Whelan or “look and feel” test .................................................................................................... 44 4.1.2. Adoption of the “three-step test” of Computer Associates v. Altai.............................................. 45 4.2. Merger doctrine.............................................................................................................................................. 46 4.3. Scenes à faire doctrine...................................................................................................................................... 48 4.4. Fair use ............................................................................................................................................................ 49 4.4.1. Risks in applying fair use to determine the legal status of interoperability information ............ 49 4.4.2. Decomposing the access phase and the re-implementation phase................................................. 51 5. Investigating the legal status of interoperability information: the European setting.................................. 53 5.1. European doctrines allowing literal copying.............................................................................................. 56 5.2. According to the commission, several APIs are not innovative in themselves .................................... 57 6. A Japanese perspective.......................................................................................................................................... 58 7. Vertical and horizontal access; transformative and substitutive uses............................................................. 59 8. Elimination of free riding vs. the creation of economic monopoly .............................................................63 8.1. The limits of technology copyright and its natural antibodies ............................................................... 66 9. Further dimensions ............................................................................................................................................... 68 9.1. Contractual arrangements............................................................................................................................. 68 9.1.1. Licenses and copyright misuse............................................................................................................. 69 9.1.2. Copyright and patent preemption of restrictions on reverse engineering..................................... 70 9.2. May patent law (as currently applied to software) limit interoperability?.............................................. 71 9.2.1. If patent can be used to hinder interoperability, is it a good idea to do so? ................................. 74 9.3. A possible economic