software

Software, as it appears, is one of those more
complicated areas of the law. Initially, software
copyrights covered only the areas of pure copying.
Similar to the origins of copyrights, judges initially
felt that copyrights in software was a concept of "you
buy it, so you can use it."

The concept of copying was messed up because people
were copying the binary code, and not the original
source code. Whereas it was the original source code
that was sought to be protected under the original
law, and lawyers and also judges scrambled to define
binary code as a "translation" of the source code.

But that did not work. Translations had to be proven
to be "human readable" and capable of carrying
meaningful messages.

Things have changed very much today and people are
trying to copyright instead:

1. The idea behind the program (Amazon's 1-Click)
2. The algorhythm behind the program (ZIP, JPEG, MP3)
3. The core concept (Windows, Linux, OS X)

More updates on a rainy day. That little entry has put
me in the mood for studying, i guess...

____________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
The New Yahoo! Movies: Check out the Latest Trailers, Premiere Photos and full Actor Database.
http://au.movies.yahoo.com