MIDWAY MFG. CO., an Illinois corporation, Plaintiff-Appellee, v. ARTIC INTERNATIONAL, INC., a New Jersey corporation, Defendant-Appellant, 704 F.2d 1009

Summary

Defendant sold circuit boards that copied and speeded up the rate of plaintiff's copyrighted video games. The court found a player was unlike a writer or a painter because the video game in effect wrote the sentences and painted the painting for him; he merely chose one of the sequences stored in its memory. Plaintiff did not claim copyrights in the design of the circuit boards, so it did not matter that those designs might be patentable. Video games were copyrightable as audiovisual works under the 1976 Copyright Act. 17 U.S.C.S. § 117 was intended only to leave unaltered the existing law governing the exclusive rights of owners of copyrights in computer programs. Plaintiff purchased the copyrights from a Japanese company and registered its works in the United States within the statutory period of the date they were originally published in Japan. Since the creator of the speeded up game was a direct infringer as a licensee who lacked plaintiff's authorization to create a derivative, ...