Oct. 17 (Portaltic/EP) –
The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has not supported Sony’s claims to strengthen the intellectual protection of its consoles and video games against a third party that markets computer programs that modify the operation of the titles.
The technology firm filed a complaint before the Regional Court of Hamburg (Germany) against the company Datel, responsible for the development and distribution of the Action Replay programs for PSP, and the Tilt FX device and software through Datel Design and Development Ltd and Datel Direct Ltd.
These products allow you to modify some of the parameters of official Sony games, thereby expanding the options that users have and that the technology company does not offer. For example, skipping more complicated screens in PSP titles.
Sony understood that these programs “allow users to transform the software underlying their games in a manner that is illegal under copyright law.” However, the Hamburg Regional Court only partially accepted some of Sony’s claims, in a ruling that was later overturned on appeal by the Hamburg Higher Regional Court, dismissing the case.
The head of PlayStation went to the Federal Court of Justice with an appeal for review. This, in turn, requested in March 2023 from the CJEU an interpretation of Directive 2009/24, on the legal protection of computer programs.
Specifically, it put at the center of the issue “whether the content of the variables that a protected computer program inserts into the RAM memory of this computer and that this program uses during its execution, is included in the scope of copyright protection.” author about the computer program and, if so, whether the insertion of modified variables into this random access memory constitutes a transformation of the computer program.”
This Thursday, the Court of Justice of the European Union ruled. Specifically, it considers that “the content of the variable data inserted by a protected computer program in the RAM memory of a computer and used by this program during its execution is not included in the protection conferred by this Directive, to the extent that this content does not permit the reproduction or subsequent production of said program”, such as is included in the sentence to which Europa Press has had access.
The reason is that the Directive protects as a “form of expression” of a computer program the source code and the object code “to the extent that they allow the reproduction or production of this program at a later stage”, but not the functionalities nor the elements that allow users to use those functionalities.
Datel’s program allows users to exploit the game’s functionalities, but it does not play the game or part of it as such, but rather requires the game to be played at the same time.
Add Comment