How does copyright extend to protect computer software? Is object code protected in the same way as source code? What are the implications of recent court decisions on copyright and the Internet? Are patents useful to the software community?
Seminar
Innovation, Software
and Reverse Engineering: Technological and Legal Issues, 23 March 2000,
Santa Clara University, USA. Chaired by Brian Fitzgerald and Cristina Cifuentes.
Going Digital 2000
A Fitzgerald, B Fitzgerald, C Cifuentes and P
Cook (editors), Going Digital 2000. Prospect Media Pty, Sydney, Australia,
February 2000.
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Contents
Worldwide, the ever increasing reliance on the Internet has created even further concerns regarding the ownership of software posted on the Internet, the rights (e.g. distribution, publication) that a software author can control, and whether copyright is a suitable way of protecting software anyway. A sui generis (i.e. of its own type) protection method has been advocated by several. However, others argue that the Internet should be a public system where copyright laws should not apply.
In the first Australian and worldwide case to deal with copyright in a shareware program distributed on the Internet, the courts held that copyright is not lost by a software author if the software is distributed on the Internet. Even further, the courts thought necessary the implication of a license regarding the redistribution of shareware software, that was, that the software has to be distributed in its entirety, without modifications, additions or deletions.
We also developed a proposal for a legal strand in the Computer Science curriculum. The first part of this proposal has been implemented by including sessions on intellectual property concepts relevant to information technology in the first year introduction to computing course.
This page: http://www.csee.uq.edu.au/~cristina/cal.html