Articles / Court: Sewing Patterns are Data, Not Code

Home | Site Index | Disclaimer | Email Me!

Source:
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2006/08/court_sewing_pa.html
June 29, 2008. Content has not been altered except to reformat for easier reading and to remove advertisement.

Court: Sewing Patterns are Data, Not Code
By Wired Blogs August 31, 2006 | 4:17:32 AM

A federal appeals court has just dealt a setback to the embroidery industry's copyright crackdown.
Yes, the embroidery industry is taking on sewing scofflaws. They even have an RIAA-like association, called the Embroidery Software Protection Coalition, with real lawyers who apparently extract settlements from suspected embroidery design pirates. The ESPC website says the problem is "just as prominent" as pirated movies and music.

One ESPC member company, Action Tapes, went so far as to sue a Minnesota sewing machine store for buying and renting out the company's sewing cartridges. From today's decision:

Action Tapes has assembled a portfolio of graphic embroidery designs which it embeds on disk-like memory cards that enable computer-run sewing machines to stitch the embedded design on fabric and apparel. Kelly Mattson is the owner of a sewing machine supplies store in northern Minnesota. Action Tapes commenced this action for willful copyright infringement, alleging that Mattson has repeatedly violated the Rental Amendments Act by renting Action Tapes memory cards to her customers without Action Tapes' permission.

Under copyright's first sale doctrine nobody can stop you from reselling or renting out copyrighted material, like books and movies, that you've legally acquired. But with the 1990 Computer Software Rental Amendments Act, Congress carved out an exception for computer programs, prohibiting anyone from renting, leasing or lending them without permission of the copyright holder.
So the case turned on whether Action Tapes' electronically-stored embroidery designs are computer programs or not. It's an interesting question. The statute defines a program as "a set of statements or instructions to be used directly or indirectly in a computer to bring about a certain result."
The Action Tapes cartridges contain code that tells computerized sewing machines how to stitch the embroidery pattern. "In essence," the plaintiff wrote in an appellate brief, "the memory card 'tells the machine what to do.'"
Of course, the disks I rent from the video store tell my DVD player (certainly as much a computer as a sewing machine) what to do -- at the very least, what to display on my TV. Data doesn't become a program just because a computer interprets it and takes action based on what it reads. I say if it's not written in a language that's Turing-complete, it's not a program.
The judge who heard the Action Tapes case applied her own analysis and concluded that real computer programs are interactive. She dismissed Action Tapes' complaint. Today the U.S. 8th Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the decision (.pdf), though on different grounds: it seems Action Tapes couldn't prove it properly registered the embroidery code as software with the U.S. Copyright Office.
If you think you might be in possession of pirated embroidery patterns, you can apply for a one-time amnesty (.pdf) from the ESPC. Be prepared to turn in your warez and pay a $300 fine.