Mitel, Inc. v. Iqtel, Inc.

How courts have described this case

Verbatim parenthetical descriptions written by other courts when citing this decision. Ranked by citation-network relevance.

• finding error to the extent the trial court discussed “whether external factors such as market forces and efficiency considerations justified Iqtel’s copying of the command codes”
• rejecting the Lotus court’s formulation, and concluding that, “although an element of a work may be characterized as a method of operation, that element may nevertheless contain expression that is eligible for copyright protection.”
• finding a company’s set of over sixty four-digit numeric “command codes,” in which particular digits indicated particular functions, “largely unoriginal” because the company’s “arbitrary selection of . . . numbers required de minimis creative effort”
• “[W]e must determine whether, as a factual matter, the defendant copied plaintiffs work.” (footnote omitted)
• “[W]e emphasize that the approach is valuable only insofar as it aids the court in distinguishing protectable elements of a work from those that are unprotectable.”
• “Although this core of expression is eligible for copyright protection, it is subject to the rigors of filtration analysis which excludes from protection expression that is in the public domain, otherwise unoriginal, or subject to the doctrines of merger and scenes a faire.”

Source: CourtListener parenthetical corpus (CC0).