Defense Command

In 1982, Williams, the manufacturer of Defender, brought suit against Artic International, the distributor of Defense Command. The suit alleged that Artic had infringed on Williams' computer program and the audiovisual copyrights for Defender both in the "attract" and "play" modes of the game.

Artic did not attempt to refute that they had copied the Defender game, but instead claimed the following:

• that there was lack of "fixation" or, in other words, the images in the game were transient and therefore could not be copyrighted.
• that a player's participation in the game withdrew the game's audiovisual work from copyright eligibility because the player was a co-author of what appears on the screen.
• that there could be no copyright protection for a ROM because it is a utilitarian object similar to a machine part.
• and finally, that there could not be any infringement since Artic did not make boards, but merely had sold kits and bought boards from other sources.

The judge rejected all of these claims and reaffirmed that computer code is copyrightable and that the way in which is stored or the fact that it is used in a game does not affect its copyright protection.

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