SAS Institute lawsuit with World Programming
| SAS Institute Inc v World Programming Ltd | |
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| Decided 2 May 2012 | |
| Case number | C-406/10 |
The SAS Institute, creators of the SAS System filed a lawsuit against World Programming Limited, creators of World Programming System (WPS) in November 2009. The dispute was whether World Programming had infringed copyrights on SAS Institute Products, and Manuals and whether World Programming used SAS Learning Edition to reverse engineer SAS system in violation with its term of usage.
The case is interesting because World Programming did not have access to the SAS Institute's source code, and so 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. Some observers say the case is as important as the Borland versus Lotus case.
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.
On 23 July 2010 Justice Arnold in the High Court of England and Wales referred a number of questions to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU), but expressed his initial views of the main claims via the following observations in the initial judgment ([2010] EWHC 1829 (Ch, [2011] RPC 1).
Justice Arnold quoted (at paragraph 56) from the "SAS language" article of (as at 25 April 2010) in support of his view that SAS is a "programming language" (and thus not protected under the Software Directive:
First, the decision confirms what WPL has always admitted, namely that it has used the SAS Manuals to emulate functionality of the SAS System in WPS. Secondly, it shows that to some extent WPL has reproduced aspects of the SAS Manuals going beyond that which was strictly necessary in order for WPS to emulate the functions of the SAS System. What it does not show is reproduction of the SAS source code by WPS going beyond the reproduction of its functionality. WPL's manual writers did not directly copy from the SAS Manuals in the sense of having one of the SAS Manuals open in front of them when writing the WPS Manual and intentionally either transcribing or paraphrasing the wording. A considerable degree of similarity in both content and language between the SAS Manual entries and the WPS Manual entries is to be expected given that they are describing identical functionality. The degree of resemblance in the language goes beyond that which is attributable to describing identical functionality.
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