The Negative Side of Copyright Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

The Negative Side of Copyright - Essay Example Copyright protection only enables the developer of software to deter the software’s copying or copying of the source code. Software copyright does not provide protection against the copying of any process, method of operation, procedure, system, principle, discovery, or concept in the software. In addition to that, software copyright does not provide any surety against independent development of software of the like. A vast majority of the software products cannot address the variety of requirements set forth to get broad protection that the patent law can afford. Most applications of software patent face problems because of the requirement for the invention to be not obvious and be new. Nevertheless, this requirement helps in the process analyzing if or not an individual should pursue copyright protection or patent. â€Å"because copyrights protect the implementation (the actual code) but not the concept, copyrights do not prevent someone from implementing an algorithm in a different programming language or with a different set of routines, for example, offering almost no protection for something as complex and flexible as software† (Zeidman, 2011, p. 93). The look and feel of software amount to behavior and thus copyright should not be used to protect them in software; the Computer Law Review Committee (CLRC) did not recommend additional protection forms for the displays on screen (Lai, 2000, p. 66). While software copyright has imposed a range of hindrances and hurdles in the way of development and spread of knowledge, free software has generated a lot of benefits. On the technological side, free software sets the stage for open source projects. One of its key examples is the development of Linux as the operating system in which functions of the free software movement serve as pre-requisite for the open source software. Linux could not have been developed and adopted as effectively without free software as it has