There is much discussion on an international level regarding the patentability of software related inventions. Recent developments have shown that the present copyright law offers little or no protection to software related inventions. Let us examine a little of the history of patents.
The Constitution of the United States of America stipulates that Congress is to have the power to encourage the advancement of science and useful arts by ensuring that inventors and authors may be granted exclusive rights to their inventions for a limited period of time in exchange for full disclosure being made public regarding that invention.
To achieve this the patent system was established so as to encourage the development of new technology by giving inventors the protection of the law for their patented inventions by preventing others from making use of the inventions without the patent holder’s permission. All this worked very well, but then along came computers.
Digital computers are machines that only function with the help of software, and there has been heated debate over recent years as to whether software related inventions should be patentable. Legislation has been passed in the United States and Canada in order to enable software related inventions to be patented, and everybody is patenting as much as possible in those two countries in order to get a competitive advantage.
In Europe, on the other hand, the European Parliament, after much lobbying from those against patenting software related inventions, rejected proposed legislation in July 2005. The American constitution states that patents are granted for the good of society, but those that are being granted to the computer industry today are considered by many to be for the good of a few large corporates. New companies in the industry are finding it harder and harder not to infringe any patents or copyrights because there are just too many patents to cope with.
There are even patents that are patents that have been granted despite their not conforming with prior art and obviousness. Officials at patents offices know precious little about software or software related inventions and there is a strong lobby to have an independent computer patents supervision agency formed and manned by Computer and Internet professionals who have been in the business from the start.
Both software and software related inventions are protected by Copyright from the moment they are recorded in some material form – that is to say when they are put into writing or, for example, stored on a CD as a data file. Copyright generally lasts for fifty years after the death of the author, though this figure may vary depending on the country and its legislation.
The only problem with Copyright though is that items that are copyrighted are generally speaking easy to copy. It is estimated that at least 50% of the software on PCs today is pirated as well as a high proportion of music CDs and video CDs.
If you have any questions you would like answered regarding software related inventions or related subjects, please contact one of our lawyers who will be happy to assist you.
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