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172 Part One Organizations, Management, and the Networked Enterprise

Copyright
Copyright is a statutory grant that protects creators of intellectual property
from having their work copied by others for any purpose during the life of
the author plus an additional 70 years after the author’s death. For corpo-
rate-owned works, copyright protection lasts for 95 years after their initial
creation. Congress has extended copyright protection to books, periodicals,
lectures, dramas, musical compositions, maps, drawings, artwork of any kind,
and motion pictures. The intent behind copyright laws has been to encourage
creativity and authorship by ensuring that creative people receive the finan-
cial and other benefits of their work. Most industrial nations have their own
copyright laws, and there are several international conventions and bilateral
agreements through which nations coordinate and enforce their laws.
In the mid-1960s, the Copyright Office began registering software programs,
and in 1980, Congress passed the Computer Software Copyright Act, which
clearly provides protection for software program code and for copies of the
original sold in commerce, and sets forth the rights of the purchaser to use the
software while the creator retains legal title.
Copyright protects against copying of entire programs or their parts. Damages
and relief are readily obtained for infringement. The drawback to copyright
protection is that the underlying ideas behind a work are not protected, only
their manifestation in a work. A competitor can use your software, understand
how it works, and build new software that follows the same concepts without
infringing on a copyright.
“Look and feel” copyright infringement lawsuits are precisely about the
distinction between an idea and its expression. For instance, in the early
1990s, Apple Computer sued Microsoft Corporation and Hewlett-Packard for
infringement of the expression of Apple’s Macintosh interface, claiming that
the defendants copied the expression of overlapping windows. The defendants
countered that the idea of overlapping windows can be expressed only in a
single way and, therefore, was not protectable under the merger doctrine of
copyright law. When ideas and their expression merge, the expression cannot
be copyrighted.
In general, courts appear to be following the reasoning of a 1989 case—Brown
Bag Software v. Symantec Corp—in which the court dissected the elements of
software alleged to be infringing. The court found that similar concept, function,
general functional features (e.g., drop-down menus), and colors are not protect-
able by copyright law (Brown Bag Software v. Symantec Corp., 1992).

Patents
A patent grants the owner an exclusive monopoly on the ideas behind an inven-
tion for 20 years. The congressional intent behind patent law was to ensure
that inventors of new machines, devices, or methods receive the full financial
and other rewards of their labor and yet make widespread use of the invention
possible by providing detailed diagrams for those wishing to use the idea under
license from the patent’s owner. The granting of a patent is determined by the
United States Patent and Trademark Office and relies on court rulings.
The key concepts in patent law are originality, novelty, and invention. The
Patent Office did not accept applications for software patents routinely until a
1981 Supreme Court decision that held that computer programs could be a part
of a patentable process. Since that time, hundreds of patents have been granted
and thousands await consideration.
The strength of patent protection is that it grants a monopoly on the underly-
ing concepts and ideas of software. The difficulty is passing stringent criteria of

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