Respecting Foreign Judgments and $79 million for clicking “I agree”

by Dennis Crouch An interesting new petition before the Supreme Court focuses on international licensing and copyright issues.  What happens when foreign courts give less weight to contracts and copyrights than would a US court? World Programming Ltd. v. SAS Institute, Supreme Court Docket No. 17-1459 (2018). [petition][docket] Agreeing not to Reverse Engineer, then Reverse Engineering: WPL, a UK software company purchased a copy of SAS’s popular software and began to study its functionality (all in the UK).  As part of the process, WPL clicked “I agree” on the SAS clickwrap licenses. Those licenses included a prohibition on reverse engineering and also limited the software use to “non-production purposes.”  According to the petition, however, “under U.K. and E.U. law, such observation and study is lawful, and contractual terms restricting such acts are null and void. . . .While  WPL was required to agree to that…

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