The software industry is now a major force in the economy, and issues of intellectual property protection will certainly shape the computer industry’s future.
An example of product software would be a word processing program or database program produced to be sold as application software.
The term ‘intellectual property’ refers to patents, copyright, trademark and trade secret. Specifically, it refers to anything created by the human mind.
Computer software is copyright whether in object or source code form. In the 1970s, software was largely protected by trade secrets because of uncertainty whether code as copyright.
But the Copyright Act of 1976 classified computer software as a ‘literary work’ subject to copyright so long as it met the criteria of qualifying as an original work of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression.
Copyright is the predominant form of software protection in the United States and abroad. In most countries, computer programs per se are not in principle eligible for patent protection.
However, in some countries certain types of computer-implemented processes and algorithms can be patent.
Software Intellectual Property
