| Atari Games Corp. v. Nintendo of America Inc. | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Court | United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit |
| Full case name | ATARI GAMES CORP. and Tengen, Inc., Plaintiffs-Appellants, v. NINTENDO OF AMERICA INC. and Nintendo Co., Ltd., Defendants-Appellees. |
| Decided | September 10, 1992 |
| Citation(s) | 975 F.2d 832 |
| Holding | |
| Atari was held liable for copyright infringement, affirming the district court's decision. | |
| Court membership | |
| Judge(s) sitting | Raymond C. Clevenger, Edward Samuel Smith, Randall Ray Rader |
| Case opinions | |
| Majority | Randall Ray Rader |
Atari Games Corp. v. Nintendo of America Inc., 975 F.2d 832 (Fed. Cir. 1992), is a U.S. legal case in which Atari Games engaged in copyright infringement by copying Nintendo's lock-out system, the 10NES. The 10NES was designed to prevent Nintendo's video game console, the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), from playing unauthorized game cartridges. Atari, after unsuccessful attempts to reverse engineer the lock-out system, obtained an unauthorized copy of the source code from the United States Copyright Office and used it to create its 10NES replica, the Rabbit. Atari then sued Nintendo for unfair competition and copyright misuse, and Nintendo responded that Atari had engaged in unfair competition, copyright infringement, and patent infringement.
The United States District Court for the Northern District of California granted a preliminary injunction against Atari, and this was affirmed by the court of appeals. However, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit differed from the district court on whether reverse engineering could hypothetically be allowed, declaring that "reverse engineering, untainted by the purloined copy of the 10NES program and necessary to understand 10NES, is a fair use."[1] Thus, Atari was denied the fair use exception to copyright infringement, due to the illicit way they obtained Nintendo's source code.
One month after the decision, a similar ruling in Sega v. Accolade determined that reverse engineering was fair use. Several legal scholars have concluded that the main difference between the cases was that Atari had lied to obtain an unauthorized copy of Nintendo's code. Legal scholars have argued that reverse engineering has since been curtailed by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 2000, upsetting the balance established in the Atari and Accolade cases.