OREANDA-NEWS. A US District Court has affirmed World Programming's entitlement to continue to market and license its WPS software in the US. In denying SAS Institute's request for a permanent injunction to prevent World Programming from selling its WPS software in the US, the US Court has confirmed that there is no legal basis for any such restriction.

The recent Court Order follows earlier rulings of the UK Court and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and confirms that the WPS software is a legitimate alternative to the SAS System software sold by SAS Institute. All courts that have considered this long-lasting dispute between SAS Institute and World Programming have consistently found that WPS software does not infringe any SAS Institute copyright.

This important ruling will provide further reassurance to customers of the long-term availability of WPS software as a robust platform for industrial analytics and data science. Not only will WPS software continue to be available to US-based customers; it will continue to be supported and developed by an extraordinarily talented team of software engineers and mathematicians that has enabled World Programming to create the WPS software used in production on a huge range of systems around the world today.

"We are pleased with this court decision, especially as it is consistent with the EU and UK court findings which dismissed all of SAS Institute's claims in prior parallel proceedings brought in the UK," said Alexander Carter-Silk at Brown Rudnick, World Programming's legal advisor. "The fact that this US case has progressed as far as it has, and requires intervention by an appeals court, is surprising. The principles of private international law are such that once a claimant such as SAS Institute has chosen its jurisdiction and had its grievance heard, that should be an end of the matter. These proceedings have never had much to do with enforcing legitimate legal rights. Across the world public policy limits intellectual property rights in time and scope in order to protect and encourage innovation."

"This latest outcome helps put the more difficult aspects of this trial behind us, allowing the World Programming team to continue focusing on what they do best, delivering innovative industrial analytics and data science technology to individuals and businesses globally," said Oliver Robinson, CEO at World Programming. "We like to compete with SAS Institute and other analytics software providers on a level playing field and customers are free to choose which software meets their needs best."

In September 2014, the US District Court affirmed previous UK and European rulings that World Programming had not infringed any copyright owned by SAS Institute nor had it breached any contracts with SAS Institute. Contrary to the UK and CJEU rulings, however, the US Court went on to find that World Programming had breached a contractual licence restriction on the use of the SAS Learning Edition. The US District Court interpretation of the licence terms, along with the associated damages award, will be a subject of appeal.

"Dealing with two sets of parallel proceedings from SAS Institute has been complex," said Peter Quarendon, Chief Scientific Officer at World Programming. "We will continue to close-out remaining issues and we are confident that we will ultimately prevail on all points in the US proceedings as we have already done in the parallel UK and European proceedings."