Crossed perspectives12 Oct 2026
Case law › European Union
SAS Institute
CJEU, Grand Chamber, 2 May 2012, case C-406/10
A program's functionality, its programming language and its file formats are not protected: only its expression is.
- Court
- CJEU, Grand Chamber
- Date
- 2 May 2012
- Reference
- case C-406/10
- Parties
- SAS Institute Inc. v. World Programming Ltd
Key takeaways
A company had recreated the behaviour of a competitor's software without ever touching its source code. Is that infringement? No, said the Court of Justice. Copyright protects the way a program is written, not what it does. Its functionality, its programming language and its file formats remain free.
For video games, this is a valuable key. An emulator designed by observing how a console behaves, without copying its code, can remain lawful. Copying the code itself, however, remains prohibited.
World Programming had designed a system able to run programs written in the SAS language, by studying a licensed version of the software. The Court held that a licensee may observe, study and test the functioning of a program in order to determine its underlying ideas and principles, and that a contract cannot prohibit this. This is the rule found in Article L. 122-6-1, III of the French Intellectual Property Code.
One reservation remains: the user manual may itself be protected as a literary work, and copying it may amount to infringement. Sony v. Datel, in 2024, extended the reasoning by excluding from protection the data that the program handles in memory.
