In Powerflex Services Pty v. Data Access Corporation, the Full Court of the Federal Court of Australia was confronted with questions as to the proper scope of copyright protection in the field of computer software. The issues arose in the context of whether certain features of the defendant's fourth generation computer language infringed the copyright in the plaintiff's computer language. The trial court had found that there was copyright infringement in the use by the defendant of specific words or commands that were used in the plaintiff's language. On appeal, the Full Court disagreed. It could not find that specific words or even a specific sequence of words constituted a "program", even though the words were used for the same meaning and had the same syntax in both languages. Since copyright protection depended on the work in question being either a literary work in the traditional sense or a program, there was no infringement. Additionally the Court found that there was no infringement as a result of the file structures in the two languages being the same, because this was necessary for compatibility.

The decision is of importance in that, for what appears to be the first time, an Australian court has held that what should be protected in computer software cases is the expression of an idea not its functionality and that where an idea or function can be expressed in only one way, there is a merger of the idea and its expression thereby taking that expression outside the ambit of what is protractible.