EU Court: no copyright in computer program functionality
02 May 2012
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Emma Barraclough, London
Europe’s highest court has ruled that the functionality of a computer program and the programming language cannot be protected by copyright
The Court of Justice of the EU went on to say in its judgment today that anyone who buys a licence for a computer program is allowed – as a rule – to observe, study or test its functioning to determine the ideas and principles that underlie the program.
The Court was ruling in a dispute between SAS Institute and World Programming. SAS filed a lawsuit after WPL launched a software program able to execute applications written in SAS Language. WPL’s program did not literally copy that of SAS but did emulate much of the functionality of SAS’s data-processing software and could understand and interpret SAS data.
Questions in the case were referred...
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