The European Court of Justice ruled on Wednesday that application programming interfaces (APIs) and other functional characteristics of computer software are not eligible for copyright protection. Users have the right to examine computer software in order to clone its functionality—and vendors cannot override these user rights with a license agreement, the court said.
The case focuses on the popular statistical package SAS. A firm called World Programming created a clone designed to run SAS scripts without modification. In order to do this, they bought a copy of SAS and studied its manual and the operation of the software itself. They reportedly did not have access to the source code, nor did they de-compile the software's object code.
SAS sued, arguing that its copyright covered the design of the SAS scripting language, and that World Programming had violated the SAS licensing agreement in the process of cloning the software.
The EU's highest court rejected these arguments. Computer code itself can be copyrighted, but functional characteristics—such as data formats and function names—cannot be. "To accept that the functionality of a computer program can be protected by copyright would amount to making it possible to monopolise ideas, to the detriment of technological progress and industrial development," the court stated.
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