"Clear, correct, and deep, this is a welcome addition to discussions of law and computing for anyone -- even lawyers!"-- Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law at Stanford Law School and founder of the Stanford Center for Internet and Society If you work in information technology, intellectual property is central to your job -- but dealing with the complexities of the legal system can be mind-boggling. This book is for anyone who wants to understand how the legal system deals with intellectual property rights for code and other content. You'll get a clear look at intellectual property issues from a developer's point of view, including practical advice about situations you're likely to encounter. Written by an intellectual property attorney who is also a programmer, Intellectual Property and Open Source helps you understand patents, copyrights, trademarks, trade secrets, and licenses, with special focus on the issues surrounding open source development and the GPL. This book answers questions such as: How do open source and intellectual property work together? What are the most important intellectual property-related issues when starting a business or open source project? How should you handle copyright, licensing and other issues when accepting a patch from another developer? How can you pursue your own ideas while working for someone else? What parts of a patent should be reviewed to see if it applies to your work? When is your idea a trade secret? How can you reverse engineer a product without getting into trouble? What should you think about when choosing an open source license for your project? Most legal sources are too scattered, too arcane, and too hard to read. Intellectual Property and Open Source is a friendly, easy-to-follow overview of the law that programmers, system administrators, graphic designers, and many others will find essential.

Software Copyright Law provides expert guidance on all the significant developments in UK law relating to copyright protection of computer software. This new edition also considers the trend of US cases in relation to "look & feel" & covers issues on the growing software piracy market in the UK. Issues are brought to life using fictional examples to illustrate points of principles & covering areas such as copyright, confidentiality, contract & patents, with an analysis of the main US & UK cases. Thoroughly updated, the book takes account of new European developments including the Database Directive & a UK Government White Paper on the importance of rights in information copyright law. The book also examines a number of recent cases e.g. Microsoft v Electro-Wide & Creative Technology v Aztec.

"The United States Code is the official codification of the general and permanent laws of the United States of America. The Code was first published in 1926, and a new edition of the code has been published every six years since 1934. The 2012 edition of the Code incorporates laws enacted through the One Hundred Twelfth Congress, Second Session, the last of which was signed by the President on January 15, 2013. It does not include laws of the One Hundred Thirteenth Congress, First Session, enacted between January 2, 2013, the date it convened, and January 15, 2013. By statutory authority this edition may be cited "U.S.C. 2012 ed." As adopted in 1926, the Code established prima facie the general and permanent laws of the United States. The underlying statutes reprinted in the Code remained in effect and controlled over the Code in case of any discrepancy. In 1947, Congress began enacting individual titles of the Code into positive law. When a title is enacted into positive law, the underlying statutes are repealed and the title then becomes legal evidence of the law. Currently, 26 of the 51 titles in the Code have been so enacted. These are identified in the table of titles near the beginning of each volume. The Law Revision Counsel of the House of Representatives continues to prepare legislation pursuant to 2 U.S.C. 285b to enact the remainder of the Code, on a title-by-title basis, into positive law. The 2012 edition of the Code was prepared and published under the supervision of Ralph V. Seep, Law Revision Counsel. Grateful acknowledgment is made of the contributions by all who helped in this work, particularly the staffs of the Office of the Law Revision Counsel and the Government Printing Office"--Preface.

This book analyzes U.S. federal cases on the copyright protection of computer software programs, to examine the role of communication in legal decision making process. It is the first to apply Anthony Giddens' theory of structuration to analyze law in a systematic and empirical way. Previous studies considered law to be independent, objective and neutral, and even those that considered social structures and actors focused on economic and political factors. Employing the framework of the author, the work, and the use, this study attempts to show how relationships and struggles of the parties are actually manifested through communication, and how the strategic communication of the parties influences the structural environment of copyright law. There has been a long-running debate over whether and how the copyright law, evolved from the era of the print technology, should be applied to computer programs, a new work of authorship. Contrary to some cautionary arguments that modern copyright law tends to protect copyright holders while disregarding authors' rights, the struggle between developers and non-developers, rather than between copyright holders and non-copyright holders, was clearly manifested in legal arguments. The construct of authorship has been modified, yet remained central in copyright discourse. On the other hand, the concept of the use, despite the significance of users in copyright regime, has yet to be developed to play an important role in the legal arguments. Moreover, the factor of whether the party was a developing entity, was found to be a single most important factor influencing the courts' decisions. But only when the party could successfully present itself as the one involved with developing activities, the court was more likely to accept its argument than the other party's. Therefore, it was the legitimacy gained by communicating the nature of the party, rather than the nature of the party itself, that made the difference in the ways the courts made decisions. This book presents how, in this process of strategic communication, the structure of copyright law was reproduced and transformed.

The success of computer programs often depends on their ability to interoperate ' or communicate ' with other systems. In proprietary software development, however, the need to protect access to source code, including the interface information

This book presents the history of one of the key debates in the continuing effort to develop a legal framework for intellectual property rights in the burgeoning computer software industry. It is the first full account of the interoperability debate-the controversy over the protectability of interface specifications and the permissibility of