1.) Appoint a software manager to implement and monitor all aspects of company software policy.
2.) Implement software codes of ethics for everyone to adhere to. The ethics should state that copyrighted software, except for backup and archival purposes, is a violation of the law.
3.) Establish a procedure for acquiring and registering software. Determine your company?s software needs, evaluate software packages, and also have supervisors approve the plans. Keep the lines of communication open.
4.) Establish and maintain a software log. The log should state the date of when the software was acquired, the registration of it, serial number, network version, location of where the software is in use, where the original is, licensing agreement and the location of the original disks.
5.) Conduct periodic audits or on an as needed basis, comparing the software log and/or other purchase records.
6.) Establish a program to educate and train your employees about every aspect of software and its uses.
7.) Maintain a library of software licenses and provide users with copies of the agreement.
8.) Having done the above seven points, the company can benefit by having obtained software legally, receive full documentation, technical support when needed and also upgrade notices.
Patents do not cover specific systems; instead they cover particular techniques, which can be used to build systems or particular features that systems can offer.(Exon, 1995) Patent grants the inventor a 17-year monopoly on its use. Once a technique or feature is patented, it may not be used in a system without the permission of the patent-holder even if it is implemented in a different way. Since a computer program usually uses several techniques and provides many features, it can infringe many patents at once.(Exon, 1995) A computer program is built out of ideal mathematical objects whose behavior is defined, not modeled approximately, by abstract rules. An example of this is when Borland International, Inc. complained in the 1st Federal District Court gave Lotus Development Corp. the benefit of patent protection to Lotus 1-2-3 menu commands and their order, but failed to require Lotus to meet the requirements of patent law, including novelty, examination and contribution to the prior art.(Exon, 1995) The Supreme Court sided with the 1st Circuit decision that one entity cannot own the user interface to programs. Meaning such as file formats, menu structures and programming languages.(Exon, 1995)
Trade secret, copyright and patent law are static forms of protection in the sense that they may exist independently of any underlying business transactions and do not necessarily require any transfer of intellectual property from one party to another.(BSA) Whereas, the need for a license agreement usually arises as one of the contractual forms of protection when the underlying business transaction involves the transfer of intellectual property, such as computer software.(BSA) Transactions involving the transfer of computer software are subject to both federal and state laws. Generally, state law governs contractual and trade secrets aspects of the transaction, while federal law governs aspects related to patent, copyright and antitrust issues. Each state has its own version, of a doctrine, of a trade secret, the common thread through these state specific laws is that if you show that you are seriously treated information as confidential and that the confidential information helped your competitive position, you can stop others from using it, if the information was improperly acquired by them, and even collect damages from the wrongdoers.(BSA)
A computer is useless without software. The two types of software typically found on a computer are operating systems software and application software. Operating system software provides interface, which makes it easier to develop programs for the system by reducing the amount of code that must be written. The operating system acts as an interface between the computer hardware, application programs and the end user. Application software consists of one or more computer program that fulfills a specific function for the user like word processing, bookkeeping or financial analysis.
Two legal cases recently within the last few years have brought to light the controversy regarding the copyright protection of software elements. Until 1992, most of the federal courts followed the decision in Whenlan v Jaslow Dental Laboratory as a precedent of similar cases. Whenlan, a small software company wrote an accounting program for Jaslow Dental Laboratory Company.(US News, 1993) Jaslow rewrote the software to run on personal computers and proceeded to sell the product. The software was identical to Whenlans in the data structures, logic, and the program structure, except for the source code. Jaslow argued that the duplicated elements were part by the idea not the expression.(US News, 1993) The court in response felt that the data structures, logic, and the program structure comprised to make a single function of a computer program; therefore copyright protection should be given to those elements also.
In 1992, Computer Associates v. Altai, Inc weakened this protection.(US News, 1993) When Altai a software developer was accused of copying various modules of a software package developed by Computer Associates, which controlled the running of applications on IBM mainframes. The court rejected Whelan?s premise that a computer program embodies one function, because programs are made up of subroutines that contain their own idea.(US News, 1993) The court recognized this would narrow the scope of software copyright protection and found this in accordance with Congressional intent of computer programs with copyright. This resulted in why currently software copyright is not as broad as it once was.