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EU Court Rules APIs, Programming Languages Not Copyrightable

Posted by samzenpus on from the free-code dept.

itwbennett writes "The European Court of Justice ruled on Wednesday that the functionality of a computer program and the programming language it is written in cannot be protected by copyright. In its ruling on a case brought by SAS Institute against World Programming Limited (WPL), the court said that 'the purchaser of a license for a program is entitled, as a rule, to observe, study or test its functioning so as to determine the ideas and principles which underlie that program.'"

1 of 215 comments (clear)

  1. Let's design a programming language... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...in which every book, song, movie, etc. is part of the syntax of the language, thus making them all uncopyrightable.