A three-judge panel of the Sixth Circuit has reversed a preliminary injunction in favor of printer manufacturer Lexmark in its lawsuit against third-party cartridge maker Static Controls. The opinion joins the Federal Circuit's ruling last month in a case involving garage door openers in refusing to read the DMCA's anti-circumvention ban to cover situations in which the copyrighted content is there only to bootstrap its way into the DMCA's protections, rather than being independently valuable.
The Sixth Circuit's opinion also includes an interesting use of the 'merger' doctrine to conclude that because Lexmark printers check that a particular program text appears in memory in the cartridge, that program text has become entirely functional and is therefore not copyrightable in the first place. (Although this piece of the opinion only got two out of three judges to sign on, it remains the opinion of the court and thus binding precedent in the Sixth Circuit.)