Low-cost airline EasyJet has described the legal action
taken by the supplier of one of its first booking systems against a
rival software house as "a complete nonsense motivated purely by
commercial jealousy".
Mike Cooper, commercial director at EasyJet, made the comment about
Navitaire, a wholly owned subsidiary of Accenture.
EasyJet's current online booking system provider, BulletProof
Technologies, is being sued in the UK by Navitaire for alleged
breach of copyright. Cooper's remarks followed BulletProof's
decision to counter-sue Navitaire in the US courts.
An Accenture representative said the US lawsuit was an effort to
distract attention from the issue of intellectual property rights.
"We filed in May 2002," she said. "We are just about to complete
the discovery stage of the proceedings. A court date is set for
November. This is an issue of copyright infringement, which we will
pursue vigorously in the UK courts."
The issue dates back to 1996, when Navitaire sold its Openres
travel reservation system to EasyJet. According to US court
documents, from 1999 onwards, EasyJet became unhappy with Openres,
claiming it to be slow, inaccurate, and unstable.
It was claimed that Openres corrupted data, suffered system
breakdowns and could not retain all the data the airline wanted to
archive. EasyJet was also unhappy with an increase in licensing
fees for Openres.
In December 2001, EasyJet replaced Openres with BulletProof's eRes
system. As part of the deal, the airline agreed that BulletProof
would be able to sell eRes to other companies.
In May 2002, Navitaire sued EasyJet in the UK, alleging that eRes
violated Navitaire software copyrights. Navitaire later added
BulletProof to the lawsuit, according to US court documents.
In its US court filing, BulletProof said eRes is significantly
different from Navitaire's Openres system. Openres was written in
Cobol, while eRes was written in Visual Basic, and the programs are
also different in structure.
"At no time did BulletProof have access to either the source code
or object code of the Openres program, and, hence, Navitaire's code
was not copied," BulletProof said.
"While the new BulletProof product and the obsolete Navitaire
product performed many of the same functions (albeit in a different
way) when invoked by similar commands, those functions were
executed by wholly different code."