Case: Copyrights/Fair Use (N.D. Cal.)

A federal district court in California held that Cribl Inc.’s reverse engineering of Splunk Inc.’s copyright protected software in order to develop its own interoperable software constituted fair use under the Copyright Act. The court found that Cribl copied the Splunk software for the purpose of learning how to write its own code that would be able to send data from Cribl to Splunk. According to the court, this use was transformative, and the underlying commercial purpose for Cribl’s actions wasn’t to compete directly with Splunk.