Torah Soft Limited sued Michael Drosnin over his book, “The Bible Code.” It is about a hidden code in the Bible, discovered by an Israeli mathematician that, according to some researchers, appears to reveal the details of events that took place thousands of years after the Bible was written. The story claims that God enclosed prophecies in a skip code - every fifth letter in the Hebrew sentences forms a word. The code is said to be so complex that only a computer can find it – and that has only latterly become possible. One such event correctly predicted was the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, according to the author.
Drosnin used software developed specially for deciphering the text that was owned by Torah Soft. The company argued that Drosnin infringed its copyright when he reproduced printouts of matrices based on the software’s results from searching the Hebrew text.
However, Federal Judge Shira A. Scheindlin ruled that the printouts of searches carried out with the software cannot be protected by copyright and dismissed the case, partly on the grounds that the matrices produced by it are similar in layout to similar software products, making the layout a “stock feature” of such software.