8216;Programming language can not be copyrighted8217;

Functionalities of a computer program and the programming language cannot be protected by copyright: Bot.

A computer programming language cannot be protected by copyright,the adviser to the EU8217;s top court said today in an opinion that could affect the competitive IT industry.

Advocate general Yves Bot argued that programming languages 8212; different digital vocabularies such as HTML and Java used to make a computer perform certain tasks should be compared to the language used by a novelist.

The functionalities of a computer programme should also not be eligible for copyright,Bot said,adding that they are the equivalent of ideas and that protecting them would 8220;amount to making it possible to monopolise ideas.8221; The advocate general8217;s opinions are not binding but the Luxembourg-based European Union Court of Justice follows his advice in 80 per cent of cases.

The opinion arises from a case pitting North Carolina-based SAS Institute,which provides business analytics software and services,against British software firm World Programming Limited.

SAS launched a complaint in Britain against WPL after the US company created a product that can execute programmes written in SAS language.

The High Court of Justice in Britain asked the EU judges to issue a preliminary ruling to clarify the scope of EU legal protection for computer programmes.

8220;The functionalities of a computer program and the programming language cannot be protected by copyright,8221; Bot said.

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Bot said however that copyright can cover 8220;the means for achieving the concrete expression8221; of the functionalities.

8220;The way in which formulae and algorithms are arranged 8212; like the style in which the computer program is written will be likely to reflect the author8217;s own intellectual creation and therefore be eligible for protection,8221; he said. But the holder of a programme license can reproduce or translate a source code without the author8217;s authorisation,under certain conditions,so as to ensure different elements of a programme work together,Bot said.