Data East USA, Inc. v. Epyx, Inc.

Data East USA, Inc. v. Epyx, Inc.
Court	United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit
Decided	November 30, 1988 (1988-11-30)
Citations	862 F.2d 204, 9 U.S.P.Q.2d (BNA) 1322
Case history
Prior actions	Epyx published a karate video game with gameplay fairly similar to the Data East's karate game, which was already available for several years. Data East subsequently brought action against Epyx for, among other allegations, copyright infringement. The district court ruled for Data East on the copyright infringement issue and Epyx appealed.
Court membership
Judges sitting	James R. Browning, Procter Ralph Hug Jr., Stephen S. Trott
Case opinions
There was no infringement on the copyright of Data East by Epyx.
Keywords
Copyright infringement

Data East USA, Inc. v. Epyx, Inc. 862 F.2d 204, 9 U.S.P.Q.2d (BNA) 1322 (9th Cir. 1988)^[1] was a court case between two video game manufacturers, where Data East claimed that their copyright in Karate Champ was infringed by World Karate Championship, a game created by Epyx. Data East released Karate Champ in arcades in 1984, and the game became a best-seller and pioneered the fighting game genre. The next year, Epyx published World Karate Championship for home computers, which sold 1.5 million copies. Data East sued Epyx, alleging that the game infringed on their copyright and trademark.

The district court found that Epyx had infringed on Data East's copyright, but not their trademark, and ordered an injunction against distributing World Karate Championship. However, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit court reversed the decision on appeal, finding that the lower court erred in finding that the works were substantially similar. As a principle, there is no substantial similarity between the expression of two works if the expression is inseparable from the idea. The court also applied the scènes à faire doctrine that no one can own a generic scene, and the merger doctrine that no one can own the expression to an idea if there is only one way to express it. Although the games shared fifteen similarities, the court determined these were inherent to making a video game about karate, and lifted the injunction against Epyx.

In the 1994 case Capcom U.S.A. Inc. v. Data East Corp., Data East used the same principle to defend its game Fighter's History from Capcom's accusations that they infringed Street Fighter II. This led most lawsuits about alleged video game clones to be settled between the mid-1990s through to the mid-2000s. This approach began to shift in 2012 with Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc. and Spry Fox, LLC v. Lolapps, Inc., as graphical improvements have made it harder to dismiss similarities as a coincidence of technological limitation.