with existing ones, and SCC did not create any new program. Appellate ruling SCC appealed the district court's ruling to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals. As is usual for federal appeals in the United States, a three judge panel heard the appeal – for this matter, the panel consisted of appellate judges Gilbert S. Merritt and Jeffrey S. Sutton, and John Feikens (a district court judge temporarily assisting the appeals court). On October 26, 2004, the judges issued their ruling, in which all three judges wrote separate opinions. Majority opinion In the majority opinion, Judge Sutton (with Judge Merritt agreeing) reversed the lower court's ruling and vacated the temporary injunction, holding that Lexmark was unlikely to succeed in its case. The case was remanded to the district court for further proceedings consistent with the opinion. On the copyright claim, the court noted that unlike patents, copyright protection cannot be applied to ideas, but only to particular, creative expressions of ideas. Distinguishing between an unprotectable idea and a protectable creative expression is difficult in the context of computer programs; even though it may be possible to express the same idea in many different programs, "practical realities"—hardware and software constraints, design standards, industry practices, etc.—may make different expressions impractical. "Lock-out" codes—codes that must be performed in a certain way in order to bypass a security system—are generally considered functional rather than creative, and thus unprotectable. With these principles in mind, it was held that the district court had erred in three ways: It had held that the Toner Loading Program was copyrightable simply because it "could be written in a number of different ways", without considering the practical realities. Because of this mistaken standard, it had refused to consider whether or not the alternative Toner Loading Programs proposed by Lexmark were practical. It had concluded that the Toner Loading Program was not a "lock-out code", because it had not sufficiently considered how difficult it would be for SCC—without Lexmark's knowledge of the code's structure and purpose—to alter the code and still pass the printer's authentication mechanisms. On the DMCA claims, the majority first considered Lexmark's claim that the SCC chip circumvented the access controls on the Printer Engine Program. It held that Lexmark's authentication sequence did not "control access" to the program; rather, the purchase of the printer itself allowed access to the program: Likewise, the majority opinion held that anyone