Too confusing
Every nation is sovereign in their laws unless specified in treaties.
Except of course, the U.S. which thinks it's laws are the world's laws.
A US federal district court has ruled SAS cannot copyright the ideas behind its analytics software, rendering a senior judicial row over national sovereignty between the UK and America largely irrelevant. Judge Rodney Gilstrap ruled on October 26 that SAS could not copyright the functionality, as distinct from code, of its …
Every company will try to get their case heard by the most sympathetic court in the most favourable jurisdiction. Why would they do anything else?
In this case, it sounds as if the plaintiffs were just sloppy in their preparation. That's not a jurisdiction thing, it's a we've-already-spent-$megabucks-on-this-nonsense thing.
Reverse engineering which doesn't involve looking at the original source code is legal in the UK because software functionality is not subject to copyright. This means that the code itself is subject to copyright but not what the code does to your computer when you run it. The US seems to think differently about this. Thankfully, what the US thinks doesn't matter. The Google vs. Oracle case is different as they lifted source code.
Here's a short, summarised version of what our laws say regarding decompilation and/or reverse engineering:
It is not an infringement of copyright for a lawful user of a copy of a computer program expressed in a low level language—to convert it into a version expressed in a higher level language, or incidentally in the course of so converting the program, to copy it,(that is, to “decompile” it). Where an act is permitted under this section, it is irrelevant whether or not there exists any term or condition in an agreement which purports to prohibit or restrict the act.
See https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1988/48/section/50B for more info.
Unlike the US, we can back up software we're legitimately allowed to use, we can alter our execution environment as we please (provided we don't alter the software itself, unless otherwise permitted to do so) and we're allowed to reverse engineer it to make new software as long as we're not looking at the source code or supplying decompiled code to people who don't have legit rights to use the software themselves. So much for the "land of the free" and its promotion of freedom...
Allowing for the fact that this was functionality of the software rather than the software itself, I was wondering that. However the judge specifically stated that it applied to this particular case; IOW he's saying this doesn't constitute a precedent.
He's probably saving himself the embarrassment of making a ruling in favour of SAS, only to see it ignored by the UK courts. Has happened before with other judges, and they don't like it (its seen as a big black mark against them).
Either that or SAS's legal eagles submitted such idiot arguments that they failed to get over Gilstrap's normally low bar.