SAS Institute Inc v World Programming Ltd
SAS Institute Inc. v World Programming Ltd (2012) C-406/10 was a decision of the European Court of Justice which established that copyright protection does not extend to software functionality, programming languages, and file types.
| SAS Institute Inc v World Programming Ltd | |
|---|---|
| Submitted 11 August 2010 Decided 2 May 2012 | |
| Case | C-406/10 |
| CelexID | 62010CJ0406 |
| ECLI | ECLI:EU:C:2012:259 |
| Case type | Reference for a preliminary ruling |
| Chamber | Grand Chamber |
| Ruling | |
| 1. Neither the functionality of a computer program nor the programming language and the format of data files in order to exploit its functions constitute a form of expression of that program and are not protected by copyright.
2. Licensed software users may observe, study, or test the functioning of the program to determine the ideas and principles which underlie its elements on condition that that person does not infringe the exclusive rights of the copyright owner. 3. Reproduction, in a computer program or user manual for that program, of elements described in the user manual for another computer program protected by copyright can infringe on the copyright in the latter if that reproduction constitutes the expression of the intellectual creation of the author of the user manual for the computer program protected by copyright. | |
| Court composition | |
| Judge-Rapporteur George Arestis | |
| President Vassilios Skouris | |
Judges
| |
| Advocate General Yves Bot | |
| Instruments cited | |
| 91/250/EEC and 2001/29/EC | |
In September 2009, the American SAS Institute, which has developed the SAS software suite since 1976, sued the British company World Programming in a copyright infringement claim against the World Programming System. The SAS Institute claimed that World Programming had copied SAS' software manuals and used SAS Learning Edition licenses to reverse engineer the program for their competing statistical analysis software.
Since World Programming lacked access to the SAS Institute's source code, the European Court of Justice the court considered the merits of a copyright claim based on observing functionality only. The European Committee for Interoperable Systems say that the case is important to the software industry.
The EU Court of Justice ruled that copyright protection does not extend to the software functionality, the programming language used and the format of the data files used by the program. It stated that there is no copyright infringement when a company which does not have access to the source code of a program studies, observes, and tests that program to create another program with the same functionality.