플랫폼 인터페이스 소프트웨어와 저작권의 적용에 관한 미국 판례 연구

Since the 1990’s to as recent as 2021, the U.S. Courts of Appeals and the Supreme Court have been dealing with the applicability of copyright law to platform interface software through numerous cases. Adequate copyright protection for original software and freedom to reuse platform interface software for interoperability are both needed to bring innovation and revitalization to the software industry. However, due to their mutual exclusivity, the industry had been asking the Courts to draw a clear boundary between the copyright monopoly domain and the public domain. Depending on the literal or non-literal nature of the interface software at issue, the Courts have taken different approaches as to whether the use of the software is within the scope of copyright protection, or the use is fair use excused from copyright infringement. Nevertheless, the Courts have continued to grant the platform interface software freedom from copyright infringement due to the utmost importance of interoperability among products and softwares in the interconnected platform-centered ecosystem. As we analyze each approach taken by the federal courts. we also investigated applicability of each approach to the appropriate sections of Korean Copyright Law. We spent much of our analysis to the fair use analysis in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Google v. Oracle case, the case that had been awaited by the software industry for more than a decade. The SAS v. WPL case, which is awaiting at the CAFC asking the Court to clarify the scope of copyright protection for platform interface software, is also thoroughly discussed.