Justice Pumfrey of the British High Court yesterday granted leave to appeal in a copyright infringement case between two rival airline ticket-booking software devlopers. Though the competing products were programmed in entirely different languages (Cobol and Visual Basic [heh]), the Pumfrey J noted the similarities in 'functional structure', drawing an analogy to the plot of a book.

The defendant developer Easyjet will respond to Navitaire's claim on 3 November in the High Court. A successful appeal has the potential to render any program that operates similarly to another one - even if written from scratch in different code - a potential infringement.

This sounds suspiciously similar to the whole Lotus Development Corp v Borland International Inc saga of the late 1990s, in which the United States Supreme Court chose not to extend protection to a program's menu system. Similarities in look and feel weren't considered then - why should they be now? Surely consistency in user interfaces, program structure, and code formatting is to be encouraged, not prohibited.