They are threatening to sue me.
No there are two issues, firstly whether iERSA infringes upon ASA's ERSA trademark, and secondly whether my application breaches the Copyright Act.
On the first point, whilst iERSA is clearly an iPhone Webbrowser and PDF reader app, and ERSA is a book, I could understand if someone might be misled, so I am happy to change the name of the application, and as a gesture of good will I will remove the application from sale by the requested date of 31 July 2010.
On the second point, I need to consider whether following section applies.
Section 43A of the Copyright Act 1968 " (1) The
copyright in a
work, or an
adaptation of a
work, is not infringed by making a temporary reproduction of the
work or
adaptation as part of the technical process of making or receiving a communication."
Now given users are authorised to download and view the ERSA, I think this section would apply.
No where in my application or my server have I taken a copy of the ERSA and republished it.
Also why aren't ASA threatening to sue Apple, Microsoft, Google, Adobe because their applications allow users to download and view the ERSA online too! Why aren't anti-piracy companies suing Bit torrent client makers for their users downloading pirated content?
I believe that iERSA is a cut down web browser using the iPhone's Safari web browser to allow a user download and view publically available PDFs files.
ASA claim that when a user downloads the PDFs they become part of my application.
I disagree, the user downloads the PDFs into their device's "Documents" directory, which is in "user space", no different from a PC's My Documents directory. No ASA data is stored in my application or application directory.
I believe that this is ASA's attempt to prevent people from accessing easily accessing the ERSA online, because who really wants to carry their laptop in a plane, by making the online ERSA hard to use, it forces users to go buy their paper copy.
That said, ASA are willing to negotiate to licence the ERSA to me, provide me with a copy and allow me to distribute it (for a price). However, that isn't what my application does, it's not designed to distribute the ERSA, its a webbrower and PDF viewer!
So I'm going to have a think about whether its worth making this app available to other pilots, because my golden rule as a iphone programming hobbyist, is as long as the app works for me I don't care whether any one buys my apps or not.
At the end o the day I think its going to depend on how much support I get from the flying community as iERSA was written because I read quite a few posts about people asking for an app like it.