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Two golf video games fought all the way to a US court recently. Here's why.

A NATION that is crazy about cricket may not know that it was Vijay Singh who ended Tiger Woods's record streak of 264 weeks as the world's No. 1 golf player in September 2004.
Or, that Singh spent 26 weeks atop the rankings before Woods overtook him by winning the Ford Championship at Doral. Or that days ago, Singh got back the No.1 spot at the Bay Hill Invitational.
Singh is little known here, since he's from Fiji and if interested you can check http://cbs.sportsline.com, which also states as `Little-Known Fact' that "Vijay is the Hindi word for victory." Well, that we know.
The dead centre of middle age, as Franklin Pierce Adams said, occurs "when you are too young to take up golf and too old to rush up to the net."
But why talk about golf, you may wonder if, like Mark Twain, you think that golf is a good walk spoiled. After all, not everybody can become a Singh or Woods.
Yet, the case I'm going to walk you through is about two golf video games that fought all the way to a US court recently: Golden Tee versus PGA Tour Golf, or more correctly, Incredible Technologies vs Global VR (Virtual Technologies).
Golden Tee of Incredible Technologies has been popular as a coin-operated video golf game, one can learn from the text of the judgment of the US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit dated March 15.
"The game can be found in taverns all over America and in other countries as well." The ad spend runs to millions, and the game has been spinning good profits too. Incredible has been in the game since 1989 and has "several copyrights on various versions of the game".
There's also the Annual Golden Tee World Championship with lots of money for the winner.
How does Golden Tee work? The software projects images of players and golf courses on the screen and pumps out sounds through speakers "in a kiosk-like display cabinet".
The control panel in front of the screen has "a plastic white ball embedded on the gameboard" called `trackball' at the centre for operating the game.
"To play the game, the trackball is rolled back for the golfer-player's back swing and pushed forward to complete the swing." Because, if by the time you get to your ball, you don't know what to do with it, you should try another sport, as a Julius Boros's quote advises.
And, the virtual golfer can choose the club, and also consider factors such as "wind and hazards (indicated on the display screen) on the course".
Other games, such as Birdie King and Sega's Virtua Golf too, use trackballs, but Golden Tee claimed to be "the first to use both a backward and forward movement."
Meanwhile, competition was brewing. "Global VR determined to create a game that was similar enough to Golden Tee so that players of that game could switch to its new game with little difficulty."
So, it hired NuvoStudios (Nuvo) to develop a new game that could drop into a Golden Tee box "to work with its controls, which should correspond as closely as possible to Golden Tee, so that a Golden Tee player could play the new game with no appreciable learning curve." Nuvo worked from a computer golf game called Tiger Woods Golf and made modifications to convert it from PC platform to an arcade game, with a trackball and buttons.
"Nuvo essentially copied, with some stylistic changes, the layout of buttons and instructions found on the Golden Tee control panel."
The final product PGA Tour Golf was very similar to the Golden Tee, in terms of the size and shape of control panel, and the placement of trackball and buttons.
`Shot shaping' choices were depicted similarly, and so was their sequence. Though the software was dissimilar, both allowed a player "to simulate a straight shot, a fade, a slice, a draw, a hook, and so on, by the direction in which the trackball is rolled back and pushed forward."
The court, however, speaks of `significant differences' between Golden Tee and PGA. Golden Tee has courses that are `make-believe' and players take generic titles such as `Golfer 1', but the PGA game "uses depictions of real courses, such as Pebble Beach and TPC at Sawgrass, and permits a player to adopt the identity of certain professional golfers - Colin Montgomerie and Vijay Singh, to name a few."
Golden Tee has arrows to demonstrate its descriptions of the trackball system, while PGA doesn't. "Global VR names the shots in its shot-shaping diagrams; Golden Tee does not."
Global shows a golf bag to help the player choose a club, offers a `grid' map of the green as a guide for putting, while Golden has no such device.
"Also, the Global VR game has a helicopter that whirls overhead from time to time. Both games mimic condescending real television golf announcers, but the announcers use different phrases."
In addition, cabinets are somewhat different, "within the realm of what is possible in arcade game cabinets" and colour schemes are different.
Thus, when Incredible found that its party was incredibly threatened by the PGA game on the tavern scene, it went to court and alleged copyright violation of video game imagery presented on the display screen and the instructional guide presented on the control panel.
Also, that the PGA game's control panel infringes the Golden Tee's `trade dress', a phrase that means "the appearance of a product when that appearance is used to identify the producer".
But Incredible was appalled when the district court observed that the expressions on the control panel were not dictated by creativity, "but rather are simple explanations of the trackball system" and so the company could at best look for "protection only from virtually identical copying".
The court also said that the video displays contained many common aspects of the game of golf. A definition worth attention is that of `useful article' - "an article having an intrinsic utilitarian function that is not merely to portray the appearance of the article or to convey information." Functional features, such as the trackball system, are generally within the domain of the patent laws, explains the judgement. So, an item may be entirely original, "but if the novel elements are functional, the item cannot be copyrighted: although it might be eligible for patent protection."
In the current case, the court studied if "arrows pointing to the direction a golf ball will fly are sufficiently original to merit protection under the copyright laws".
Dismayed that the district court didn't grant it injunction against the rival game, Incredible argued before the Court of Appeals that one had to consider what happens in the marketplace. It said: "Bar and tavern patrons, often in dimly lit spaces, typically approach and play these video games while consuming alcohol; they are not consumers using high degrees of care in selecting, identifying, or differentiating the Golden Tee and PGA Tour games."
The Circuit court observed, "One wonders how different the control panels would have to be to avoid confusing such users," and affirmed the decision of the district court.
"Golf is very much like a love affair, if you don't take it seriously, it's no fun. If you do, it breaks your heart. Don't break your heart, but flirt with the possibility," said Louise Suggs as a guideline for golfers. Is this something for heartbroken Incredible to draw insight from?