Dimitri Sabatakakis, CEO of Systran, a French company that develops and markets machine translation software and has taken legal action against the Commission, has asked the Court of First Instance (CFI) to acknowledge its rights and to agree to almost €50 million in compensation. The parties were heard before the Court on 27 October (case T-19/07).

AD HOC SOFTWARE

Since 1975, the Commission has been using the machine translation software, Systran, developed in 1968 by Peter Toma and by the company WTC, taken over in 1986 by the French company Gachot SA to form the Systran group. A contract was drawn up in 1987 between the latter and the Commission to establish the framework for adapting to the version of the “EC Systran Mainframe” software specific to the European Community. The Commission, which principally developed dictionaries and certain linguistic procedures, ended this cooperation in 1991. Systran never gave up its intellectual property rights on the software. It continued its developments and became more widely known thanks to Babelfish, a web-based translation service, developed in partnership with Altavista. In 1997, the Commission resumed contact with Dimitri Sabatakakis to obtain a version of its software similar to Babelfish. New contracts were agreed with Systran Luxembourg for the migration of the EC-Systran version from the Systran Unix version developed by Systran as of 1991, which was to include the Commission’s dictionaries. A maintenance contract relating to the development of the software and the user licence was to follow.

RECOURSE TO COMPETITOR

But in 2003, the Commission published a call for tenders for the maintenance and development of the new version, EC Systran Unix, and awarded the contract to the company Gosselies, which, until then, had been inactive. The Systran group considers this to be an infringement of its intellectual property rights which necessitates disclosure of its know-how. It underlines that Gosselies had no competence in computer linguistics, and was linked to Henri Grethen, economy minister at the time. After various unfruitful conciliation attempts (including via the ombudsman), Systran and its Luxembourg subsidiary appealed to the court to order the cessation of the acts of infringement and of disclosure and the confiscation of all support material held by the Commission and by Gosselies on which are reproduced the information technology developments carried out from the versions of the Systran software.

CFI COMPETENCE?

The first issue is that of the competency of the Court, the Commission failing to recognise this due to the fact that it is not specifically mentioned in the contracts in question. On the other hand, the applicants maintain that “the Court is competent to judge the faults of the Commission which are, by their very nature, extra-contractual.” Furthermore, the Commission considers that neither the acts of infringement nor the act of disclosure of know-how in terms of intellectual property rights fall within the responsibility of the Community jurisdictions.

WHO HAS OWNERSHIP?

In substance, the Commission contests the rights on the Systran software, claiming that the plaintiffs would not be able to prove this. It considers itself to be the owner of intellectual property rights for the EC Systran versions that it constantly enhanced, according to its requirements, ever since the initial version, as proven by the contracts agreed with WTC which provide that no transfer of rights or obligations can take place without its prior consent. Not having authorised this transfer at the time of the takeover of WTC by the Systran group, it does not acknowledge that the latter has any intellectual property rights. Furthermore, it claims exclusive property rights on the lexicons and dictionaries it developed for its own requirements.

Systran SA and its Luxembourg subsidiary consider that this contract, which dates back to 1987, only grants the Commission a licence of use and not intellectual property rights on the initial version of EC Systran. Moreover, it maintains - and the President of the Court insisted on this point during the hearing - that what is in question in the dispute is the version of EC Systran Unix delivered in 2002, derived from the Systran Unix version, which is completely different to the initial (mainframe) version which has become obsolete and which remains dependent on the Systran system. “This is an original piece of work,” underlines Dimitri Sabatakakis, “that we wrote alone from 1991 to 1993, and which pre-dated the contracts agreed with the Commission in 1998.” As a result, the Systran group can oppose any modification of EC-Systran Unix without its authorisation. From the time that the Commission entrusted the modification and development of the EC-SYSTRAN Unix version to a third company, it committed an act of infringement, recognised by Directive 91/250/EEC on the legal protection of computer programmes as a crime, a quasi-crime or at the very least an error likely to lead to compensation for damages caused by the Community institutions. Systran underlines that it is in bad faith that the Commission did its utmost to deviate the debate on proof of ownership of the software to avoid a conviction for infringement because the defense of intellectual property rights in the majority of European countries is based on a presumption of ownership which assumes that the person using a work is the owner of that work. According to Dimitri Sabatakakis, “the hearing made it possible to demonstrate, as agreed by the judge-rapporteur, that Systran is the exclusive owner of the Systran Unix software”. Julian Thompson, the spokesperson for the Commission’s directorate-general for translation, refused to comment while the case was before the court.