Supreme court refuses software infringement case.

The U.S. Supreme Court let stand lower court rulings which permit the owner of a physical copy of software to break access codes and modify computer source code so long as the changes constitute "an essential step in the utilization" of the program, and the software is used "in no other manner." The article reporting on the court's refusal is here and the underlying appeals decision is here. The case was filed by a programmer who created original software which was used by a title company to track customer information. The programmer resigned from his employment with the company, but permitted it to use the software provided it made no changes to the source code. The title company broke the software locks on the source code put in place by the programmer, and made modifications including bug fixes and other functional changes as they felt were needed. The programmer then sued for copyright infringement. No word yet on whether the Court will hear the closely watched Ebay v. MercExchange patent case.