This week marks the culmination of a four-year legal wrangle between Computer Associates International Inc and Reliability Research Inc over who owns 102 programs that analyse and improve the reliability of IBM Corp mainframe computers. The trial, in District Court in New York, centres on a phrase within licensing agreement between Reliability Research and Computer Associates that could make the former sole owner of all the programs despite the fact that many were developed and marketed by the latter. Under a 1984 marketing agreement with University Computing Co, Reliability retained sole ownership of its Reliability Plus program and all subsequent improvements to it, which also included any other offerings in the area of computer reliability made by University Computing, which was acquired by Computer Associates in 1987. Reliability argues that this phrase means that if Computer Associates brings out any software in the same area that does the same thing, Reliability has automatic ownership. Computer Associates contests that this is blantantly unjust given that it has never used any Reliability’s software in any of its offerings.
