SAS Institute lawsuit with World Programming
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The SAS Institute, creators of SAS System filed a lawsuit against World Programming Limited, creators of World Programming System or WPS. The dispute was whether World Programming had infringed copyrights on SAS Institute Products, and Manuals and whether World Programming used SAS Learning Edition to reverse engineer SAS system in violation with its term of usage.
The High Court of England and Wales made the following observations:
- SAS can be considered a general programming language, though it serves largely as a database programming language and a language with a wide variety of specialized analytic and graphic procedures
- First, it confirms what WPL has always admitted, namely that it has used the SAS Manuals to emulate functionality of the SAS System in WPS. Secondly, it shows that to some extent WPL has reproduced aspects of the SAS Manuals going beyond that which was strictly necessary in order for WPS to emulate the functions of the SAS System. What it does not show is reproduction of the SAS source code by WPS going beyond the reproduction of its functionality.
- WPL's manual writers did not copy directly from the SAS Manuals in the sense of having one of the SAS Manuals open in front of them when writing the WPS Manual and intentionally either transcribing or paraphrasing the wording. A considerable degree of similarity in both content and language between the SAS Manual entries and the WPS Manual entries is to be expected given that they are describing identical functionality. The degree of resemblance in the language goes beyond that which is attributable to describing identical functionality.
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