Newsletter
NO COPYRIGHT IN USER'S MANUALS?
Article 10-1 of the Copyright Law provides that copyright protection extends only to expression of a work, and not to the ideas, procedures, manufacturing processes, systems, modes of operation, concepts, principles or discoveries so expressed. But there has been considerable dispute in practice as to whether the law still protects a work when the possible means of expression are highly limited, or when there is only one possible form of expression, so that the expression and the concepts expressed are in-separably combined.
In a year 2000 criminal judgment, the Tainan District Court, citing two judgments of the Tai-wan High Court, held that although textual statements in a product catalogue were a form of expression, such expression was limited by the fact that the number of possible layouts was limited and the layout had no special editorial meaning; furthermore, the concepts expressed were not distinguishable from the form of ex-pression. For these reasons, such a form of ex-pression was not protected by copyright.
The Taiwan High Court took a similar view in a year 2000 criminal judgment, in which it held that a product user's manual was not protected under the law. But the Taipei District Court, in a 2000 civil judgment relating to the same incident, did not follow the opinion of the Taiwan High Court, but took an entirely opposing view. In its judgment, the Taipei District Court pointed out that Article 87-1, Paragraph 1, Item 5 of the law provides for an exception to the prohibition on parallel imports of instructions or user's manuals for goods, machinery or equipment, if they ac-company such goods, machinery or equipment when lawfully imported, except when they are the principal objects of importation. Since the law specified user's manuals as enjoying copy-right protection, as long as an user's manual is not plagiarized from the work of another, but is an original work created by independent effort, it is protected by the law.