A year ago, the Court of Justice of the European Union dealt with the scope of the legal decompilation of the computer programme, which was governed, inter alia, by the provisions of the EU Directive on computer programmes (‘the Directive’).Directive 2009/24”.
The decision adopted by the Court on this matter on 6 October 2021, states that decompiling a program without the creator's consent is possible if the program does not work. Decompilation is not tantamount to violating copyright if it is made to fix an error that the program's creator does not want or cannot fix.
On C-13/20 The Belgian Top System company was gaining its rights. For many years the company has provided software made for the needs of the client – the public company Selorem. However, they were not satisfactory and contained numerous errors that the Top System did not fix. In this regard, Selor began to amend herself.
The study in the expert case shows that Selor decompiled Top System's output libraries, aiming to recreate their source codes. Selor admits that he decompiled part of the TSF, whose functions were integrated into Selor applications to disable one with his function that proved flawed.
The Top System therefore requested a decision on whether Selor's decompilation of the TSF involved a breach of the Top System of exclusive rights to the work, and also made a request for the Kingdom of Belgium to make good the damage suffered by Top System as a result of the decompilation and duplication of the TSF's source codes.
According to the TEU, these requests cannot be met in this particular case because Directive 2009/24 In Article 6 recalls the possibility of decompiling the program without the permission of its authors, when necessary to achieve interoperability with other software and after meeting additional conditions. In turn Article 5 The directive refers to the right to remedy an error, but cannot be corrected without the consent of the creator, inter alia, in case of duplication of code or its translation – cases of the need to obtain consent from the creator describe Article 4 points (a) and (b) in which there is no decompile.