zurück zur Übersicht European Court of Justice rules on extent of copyright protection for computer programs

On May 2, 2012 the European Court of Justice (ECJ) rendered a judgement in case C 406/10 (SAS Institute Inc. vs. World Programming Ltd.) following a reference for a preliminary ruling under Article 267 TFEU from the High Court of Justice of England and Wales, Chancery Division (United Kingdom).

The ECJ decided that the object of protection under Art. 1(2) of Council Directive 91/250/EEC of 14 May 1991 on the legal protection of computer programs (OJ 1991 L 122, p. 42), includes the forms of expression of a computer program and the preparatory design work capable of leading, respectively, to the reproduction or the subsequent creation of such a program. However, neither the functionality of a computer program nor the programming language and the format of data files used in a computer program in order to exploit certain of its functions constitute a form of expression of that program for the purposes of Article 1(2) of Directive 91/250 and, as such, are not protected by copyright in computer programs for the purposes of that directive.

Furthermore, the ECJ decided that Article 5(3) of Directive 91/250 must be interpreted as meaning that a person who has obtained a copy of a computer program under a licence is entitled, without the authorisation of the owner of the copyright, to observe, study or test the functioning of that program so as to determine the ideas and principles which underlie any element of the program, in the case where that person carries out acts covered by that licence and acts of loading and running necessary for the use of the computer program, and on condition that that person does not infringe the exclusive rights of the owner of the copyright in that program.

Finally, the ECJ decided that Article 2(a) of Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society must be interpreted as meaning that the reproduction, in a computer program or a user manual for that program, of certain elements described in the user manual for another computer program protected by copyright is capable of constituting an infringement of the copyright in the latter manual if – this being a matter for the national court to ascertain – that reproduction constitutes the expression of the intellectual creation of the author of the user manual for the computer program protected by copyright.

The full text of the decision can be downloaded here.

Should you have any questions please feel free to contact: schiuma@mueller-bore.de.

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