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Authored by: Anonymous on Sunday, September 02 2012 @ 03:10 AM EDT |
There is a big difference between works of fiction and computer programs - and
that is that computer programs have a functional use.
For example, if I were to author a book "Parry Hotter" which told the
tale of a young boy going to wizard school, it would be fairly obvious that I
was basing my text on somebody else's copyright work.
However let's suppose I write a program to solve a particular problem. Since
there are generally only a limited number of ways to do this, my program would
probably look quite similar to the programs others have written to solve the
same problem.
In other words, there are an infinite number (for any value of infinite which we
humans understand) of books which can be written. But there are only a finite
number of programs.
That is why the test for copyright in software is much more stringent, and also
why software patents are so dangerous.
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