How do I protect SOFTWARE?

The traditional, and most common, form of protection for software is a copyright.  Due to the Copyright (Computer Software) Amendment Act 1985, software is considered to be a "literary work."  But a copyright only protects the product of an idea.  A patent protects the idea itself.

An ever growing background of legal rulings continues to evolve software patentability.  Software can be called a collection of processes, a unique machine, or both.  The number of software patents jumped into the thousands during the nineties, prompting the USPTO to publish a set of guidelines for software patentability.  Obtaining a software patent can be difficult.  Determining nonobviousness and evaluating prior art can both be problematic. 

USC will evaluate new software technologies to see which form of protection will be appropriate.

Public Domain

Public domain software is software that the public may use for free. Ironically, however, it is typically licensed for this purpose.

Under the Berne Convention, which most countries have signed, anything written down is automatically copyrighted. This includes programs. Therefore, if you want a program you have written to be in the public domain, you must take some legal steps to disclaim the copyright on it; otherwise, the program is copyrighted.

Sometimes people use the term “public domain” in a loose fashion to mean “free” or “available gratis.” However, “public domain” is a legal term and means, precisely, “not copyrighted.”

Open Source Software

The term “open source” is used by some people to mean more or less the same as “free.” Although it is not exactly the same: nearly all free software is open source, and nearly all open source software is free.

A more in-depth definition can be found at the Open Source Initiative.

Copylefted Software

Copylefted software is free software whose distribution terms ensure that all copies of all versions are free software. This means, for instance, that copyleft licenses generally disallow others to add additional requirements to the software (though a limited set of safe added requirements can be allowed) and require making source code available. 

Copyleft is a general concept; to actually copyleft a program, you need to use a specific set of distribution terms. There are many possible ways to write copyleft distribution terms, so in principle there can be many copyleft free software licenses. However, in actual practice nearly all copylefted software uses the GNU General Public License. Two different copyleft licenses are usually “incompatible‘” which means it is illegal to merge the code using one license with the code using the other license; therefore, it is good for the community if people use a single copyleft license.