relatively unimportant. A related point is that although the text of a computer program may be an "original work of authorship", protected by copyright laws, the algorithms and designs that the program embodies may be better considered to be "processes, procedures, systems, methods of operation", which are explicitly excluded from copyright protection although they may be protectable by patents. The distinction between the code's SSO, which is protected by copyright, and the protocol or algorithm, which is patentable, is however extremely difficult to maintain. The Whelan ruling has been criticized as being "dangerously broad". By saying that the purpose of the program was to assist a Dental lab operation, and that anything not essential to that purpose was an expression, it left open a wide range of functions that could be deemed "not essential" and therefore subject to protection. In the 1988 Healthcare Affiliated Services, Inc. v. Lippany the court took a position more in line with the idea-expression merger concept, saying that the defendant's choice of scope, variables to be used and other aspects of what its software would do did not constitute the SSO. In 1987 the Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit rejected the extension of copyright protection to the non-literal elements of computer programs in the case of Plains Cotton Cooperative Ass'n v. Goodpasture Computer Serv. The court held that input formats were idea rather than expression and refused to extend protection to these formats. The court said: "We decline to embrace Whelan." Computer Associates v. Altai In Computer Associates Int. Inc. v. Altai Inc. in 1992 the Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the conclusion in Whelan that the structure, sequence and organization of a program might by protected by copyright where appropriate. However, the court went on to say, "As we have already noted, a computer program's ultimate function or purpose is the composite result of interacting subroutines. Since each Subroutine is itself a program, and thus, may be said to have its own 'idea,' Whelan's general formulation that a program's overall Purpose equates with the program's idea is descriptively inadequate." The Second Circuit introduced the three-step Abstraction-Filtration-Comparison test, and several other circuits later adopted this test. In the abstraction step the court identifies similarities starting from the object and source code and moving up to higher levels of abstraction. In the filtration step any legitimate similarities are discarded. Elements removed in