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Intellectual Property and Commercial Court

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2012 Min Zhu Su Zi No. 39

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Decision No. 2012 Min Zhu Su Zi No. 39
Date April 24, 2014
Decision Highlight

The idea-expression dichotomy in copyright law is to ensure that only the expression but not the idea and concept is protected. However, if there is only one way (or very limited ways) to convey the idea and concept, the idea will be monopolized by the original author because other authors have no alternative ways to express the idea. The result of the idea monopoly will slow down the development of culture and art, as well as violate the freedom of speech, teaching, writing and publishing. Hence, if there is only one or limited ways to express some specific idea, or the idea and expression is inseparable and indistinguishable, it is inevitable that other’s expression in a similar manner does not infringe upon the copyright. This is also known as the “merger doctrine of idea and expression”. Through investigation, the witness Yun-Hsuan Chu had to use the same database as the ASUS company did while developing eLogistics system. Thus she had to call the standard function, database function, and custom function based on the common database (which is the same database the ASUS ERP system used). Then the witness read and wrote the information in the database, and set the parameters. Accordingly, given that the eLogisitcs system shares the same database as the ASUS ERP system, the code development of database parameters setting function and database calling function is limited by existing content in the shared database. Hence, the way of expression is severely limited, and it is impossible to read and write the content of the same database by using different programming approaches. As a result, the merger doctrine of idea and expression should apply in this case.

Keywords

Merger Doctrine of Idea and Expression, Idea-Expression Dichotomy

Relevant statutes Article 10-1 of the Copyright Act
  • Release Date:2020-11-13
  • Update:2020-12-07
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