Abstract

The judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union in the case C-406/10 SAS Institute Inc. v World Programming Ltd has a significant impact both on the entities entitled under proprietary copyrights to computer programs and on end-users of the software themselves. Therefore, the article comprehensively analyses the scope of copyright protection law provided for the form of expression of works, including in particular computer programs, which was determined by the judgment in question. The authors assess the judgment of the Court of Justice of the European Union and its implications for the issue of extending copyright protection not only to the form of expression of a specific category of work, such as a computer program, but also on the content of such work. Basing on the existing EU legislation and other rulings in a similar matter, the article discusses issues of ensuring legal protection under copyright law for such elements of software as functionality, programming languages or formats of computer program’s data files.