The European Court decided that copyright could not apply to programming languages.

The European High Court on Wednesday, May 2, decided in the case of SAS Institute, the developer of the SAS System , against World Programming Limited (WPL). Court ruling states:

... In order to create a WPS , the WPL has legally acquired an educational version of the SAS System, the license of which permits the use of SAS for non-production purposes. Thus, while the WPL studied the SAS product, there is no reason to believe that the WPL specialists gained access to the SAS source code.

... Only a specific expression of ideas and principles is protected by copyright. The object of protection provided by Directive 91/250 is an expression in the form of a computer program, in source or object code, that does not prohibit reproducing specific functionality in other programming languages. Based on these considerations, the court considers that neither the functions of the computer program, nor the programming languages, nor the data formats can be protected by copyright.

The parallels with the Oracle v Google case are obvious. US judges have to decide whether Google is guilty of copyright infringement due to the use of Java API in the Android OS.
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The jurisdiction of the European Court does not extend to the United States, so its decision has no formal consequences for Google and Oracle. However, a precedent has been created, and perhaps the judges will take this into account when considering the case.

Google believes that copyright cannot be extended to languages ​​and APIs, comparing them with words and phrases of natural languages, and quoting Sun and Oracle executives in which they speak in favor of Java openness.

Oracle insists that Google should pay royalties for using the Java API, despite the fact that the Dalvik virtual machine was created “from scratch”. In addition, Oracle questions the very fact of such development and tries to prove that parts of the Dalvik source code were copied.