In Europe, the existence of and rights conferred by copyright in software is determined by Directive 2009/24/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 23 April 2009 on the legal protection of computer programs (which replaced Directive 91/250/EEC). The directive aims to harmonise the law in this area and deal with issues raised by the need for interoperability.
“With a bit of pathos one may say that the CJEU has restored the old exhaustion principle to its full glory in the digital age. In order to do so the Court did not hesitate to be adventurous with legal interpretation and has also opened new fields for discussion.” On July 3 the CJEU delivered…
Guest Blog by Pamela Samuelson, Berkeley Law School Are programming languages, program functionality, and data interfaces protectable by copyright law or not? These questions were highly contentious in the United States during the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s. Plaintiffs in several cases argued that because these were parts of the “structure, sequence, and organization” (SSO) of…
