Software copyright is the application of copyright in law to machine-readable software. While many of the legal principles and policy debates concerning software copyright have close parallels in other domains of copyright law, there are a number of distinctive issues that arise with software. This article primarily focuses on topics particular to software.
Software copyright is used by software developers and proprietary software companies to prevent the unauthorized copying of their software. Free and open source licenses also rely on copyright law to enforce their terms. For instance, copyleft licenses impose a duty on licensees to share their modifications to the work with the user or copy owner under some circumstances. No such duty would apply had the software in question been in the public domain.
In Canada, software is protected as a literary work under the Copyright Act of Canada. Copyright is acquired automatically when an original work is generated; the creator is not required to register or mark the work with the copyright symbol in order to be protected. The rights holder is granted: the exclusive right of reproduction, the right to rent the software, the right to restrain others from renting the software and the right to assign or license the copyright to others. Exceptions to these rights are set out by the terms of Fair Dealing; these exempt users from copyright liability covering usage and reproduction when performed for research, private study, education, parody or satire. Changes to the Copyright Act in regard to digital copyright were debated in the Canadian Parliament in 2008. Bill C-61 proposed alterations of the breadth and depth of exemptions for uses such as personal back-ups, reverse engineering and security testing.
A 1979 East German court ruling found that software was "neither a scientific work nor a creative achievement" and ineligible for copyright protection, legalizing software copying in the country.
Computer Programs Directive
Software can be copyrighted in India.
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Proprietary software is software that, according to the free and open-source software community, grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing the software or modifying it, and—in some cases, as is the case with some patent-encumbered and EULA-bound software—from making use of the software on their own, thereby restricting their freedoms.
Richard Matthew Stallman (ˈstɔːlmən; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to use, study, distribute, and modify that software. Software that ensures these freedoms is termed free software. Stallman launched the GNU Project, founded the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in October 1985, developed the GNU Compiler Collection and GNU Emacs, and wrote all versions of the GNU General Public License.
A free-software license is a notice that grants the recipient of a piece of software extensive rights to modify and redistribute that software. These actions are usually prohibited by copyright law, but the rights-holder (usually the author) of a piece of software can remove these restrictions by accompanying the software with a software license which grants the recipient these rights. Software using such a license is free software (or free and open-source software) as conferred by the copyright holder.
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