Decision The court reexamined the district court's process and found no significant fault with it. After taking out all functional elements and elements from the public domain, only a few lists and macros in OSCAR 3.5 were similar to ADAPTER, and their impact on the program was not large enough to declare copyright infringement. The court found that the similarity in services required by the operating system was due to the nature of the operating system, thus it was not protected by copyright. Similarly, the flow charts were found to be an element dictated by external factors flowing from the nature of the work, also unprotectable by copyright law. In light of this analysis, the court upheld the district courts finding that there was no copyright infringement by OSCAR 3.5.With respect to code, the district court observed that after the rewrite of OSCAR 3.4 to OSCAR 3.5, “there remained virtually no lines of code that were identical to ADAPTER.” Id. at 561. Accordingly, the court found that the code “present[ed] no similarity at all.” Id. at 562.CA's second argument for the appeal concerned trade secret misappropriation. The district court determined that the allegation of misappropriation was based on Altai's use of the infringing material, therefore the copyright infringement claim preempted the misappropriation claim according to 17 U.S.C. § 301. Upon revisiting the matter of trade secret misappropriation, the court found that with Arney's potential breach of confidentiality and Altai's potential liability for improper trade secret acquisition, these extra elements differentiate the trade secret misappropriation claim from the copyright infringement claim. The court vacated the district court's preemption ruling and remanded the case back to the district court. Reactions The abstraction-filtration-comparison test has been quickly adopted by the courts. In fact, every court since 1992[-2006] has chosen to use the 3-step filtration test over the Whelan test. Some, however, have criticized the approach and claim that it overly narrows the scope of copyright protection. CA and other large computer companies argue that without broader protection, the test will stifle development and disincentivize programmers from actively designing and improving programs. See also Copyright infringement of software List of leading legal cases in copyright law Analytic dissection References Further reading Pamela Samuelson, Why Copyright Law Excludes Systems and Processes from the Scope of Its Protection, 85 Tex. L. Rev. 1921, 1969-1971 (2007). External links Expert Witness's Perspective on Copyright Infringement in Software Cases