SAS Institute is a software company in North Carolina. Founded in 1976, it employs thousands of people in the United States and thousands more around the world. World Programming, Ltd. (WPL) is a British company that decided to build a clone of SAS’s popular analytics software and, as several courts have found, broke the law to do it. After a decade of litigation across two continents and an unpaid multi-million-dollar judgment, the parties are once again in court. This time, however, WPL’s arguments pose grave dangers to all owners of other copyrighted works. WPL did not try to compete with SAS by building a different or better product. Instead, it ordered copies of SAS’s products under the guise of an educational license, but with the true intent to reverse-engineer and copy key elements, including the selection and arrangement of its outputs, and even the manuals licensed users receive from SAS. The result is that WPL produced a clone, taking the exact same input and producing the exact same output that SAS does. Avoiding the years of investment and fine-tuning that SAS undertook to create its market-leading software, WPL undercut SAS’s price in the market and lured away SAS’s customers.
Copyright
- Computer Law
- Fair Use
- First Sale Doctrine
- Copyright Office Officially Cancels Registration for AI Graphic Novel
- New USPTO Tool Aims to Help IP Newbies Identify Their Rights
- Report Calls Out Cloudflare for Facilitating Piracy, Counterfeits
- Blockish IP: The Top IP Events That Affected Emerging Technologies in 2022
- This Year is Poised to Be a Landmark One for Tattoo Copyright Litigation
Recent Posts
- Other Barks & Bites for Friday, February 3: Trump Sues for Copyright Infringement, Google Wins Transfer from TX to CA, and Nike Takes Lululemon to Court for Patent Infringement
- Revolution Rope Inventor Tells Justices She Deserves Her Day in Article III Court
- The USPTO Claims it Wants to Ensure ‘Robust and Reliable’ Patents – But Its Questions Imply Another Assault on Patent Owners
- USPTO Issues Final Rule to Eliminate CLE Certification Program
- This Week in Washington IP: IPWatchdog Event to Review the State of the PTAB; US Inventor Protests in D.C.; and the House Considers Supply Chain Challenges