NEWS CJEU: no copyright for computer program functionality
Europe’s highest court ruled in May that copyright protection does not extend to the functionality of a computer program or its programming language.
Ruling in a case between SAS Institute and World Programming (WPL), the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) said anyone licensing a computer program could observe, study or test its functioning to determine the ideas and principles underlying that program.
Hamish Sandison, partner at Field Fisher Waterhouse LLP, welcomed the decision and said extending copyright protection to a program’s functionality would stifle innovation and competition.
Soſtware-producer SAS developed SAS System, a program for processing and analysing data. WPL, a company based in the UK, produced an alternative soſtware program capable of executing application programs written in SAS language. While this soſtware did not completely copy SAS’s program, it emulated much of the program’s functionality.
SAS sued WPL in the UK’s High Court before, last year, Mr Justice Arnold referred two questions on the interpretation of the 1991 and 2001 Directives to the CJEU. Te CJEU’s Advocate General Bot then recommended the court rule that the functionality of a computer program and its programming language should not be protected by copyright.
On May 2, 2012, the CJEU agreed. It said that allowing computer programs to be copyrighted would allow companies to monopolise ideas—and would hinder technological progress and industrial development.
But the court said a company could prevent a rival from developing soſtware if it procured the programming language’s source code. Only observing, studying or testing that program is allowed, the court said. Tis “struck the right balance”, said Sandison.
Te court added another caveat by saying it could be an infringement if one company reproduced
Google fights online piracy, removes infringing links
Copyright owners are increasingly demanding that Google removes links to allegedly pirated content, according to figures revealed in its Transparency Report in May.
Te statistics show that by the end of May 2012 the Internet company was receiving nearly 360,000 requests each week to remove links from its index. Te volume of requests has risen rapidly since July 2011, the point at which the statistics begin. In that month, Google was contacted about 129,063 links per week.
Troughout May 2012, Microsoſt was by far the biggest complainant, asking Google to remove almost 470,000 links to mainly pirated soſtware. In second place, NBC Universal complained over around 190,000 links. In total, Microsoſt has made more than 2.5 million complaints.
Google, which shared the statistics as part of a drive to be more transparent about what affects its search results, removed about 1.2 million links on 24,000 sites in May 2012. Te company said that between July and December 2011, it removed 97 percent of links subject to removal requests.
In Google’s blog post, senior copyright counsel Fred von Lohmann said fighting online piracy was “very important”. He said Google removes links only if the requests meet the standards under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a US law allowing Internet companies to removed allegedly infringing material on request.
Under the law, the copyright owner must provide information about the infringing material and on which site it is located, along with “sufficient” information to identify the copyrighted works.
Von Lohmann said the ‘notice and takedown’ process struck the “right balance” between the needs of copyright owners, the interests of users and Google’s efforts to provide a useful search service. He said it usually takes about 11 hours for a request to affect search results.
But he said Google also tries to detect erroneous or abusive removal requests. Recently, an organisation representing “a major entertainment company” asked Google to remove a link to a newspaper review of a television show. “Te requests mistakenly claimed copyright violations
10 World Intellectual Property Review July/August 2012
of the show, even though there was no infringing content,” von Lohmann said.
Google has been removing links for some time but this is the first time it has published statistics on removal requests.
www.worldipreview.com
elements of the computer program’s manual—“if that reproduction constitutes the expression of the intellectual creation of the author of the manual”. Te choice, sequence and combination of commands, syntax, keywords and mathematical concepts could be copyright protected if they met the court’s “originality” test, Sandison said.
SAS’s claim will now return to the UK High Court, which will have to decide whether any elements of the SAS manuals copied by WPL were copyright protected.
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