Talk:Software copyright

Missing an important point that many would like to know

Apart from copying and redistibuting someone else's work, how much of that work are you allowed to replicate in your own software. For example, if someone wanted to program a word-like-software how much of the word features is he/she allowed to use as his own noting that he will program it from scratch.

I expect you'd be interested in looking at Lotus Dev. Corp. v. Borland Int'l, Inc., which addresses this very issue. 128.220.159.20 (talk) 20:15, 30 November 2010 (UTC)

Possibly biased

I tagged this article as possibly NPOV because the first sentence is awkward:

Software copyright, the relatively recent extension of copyright law to software, allowed a market for proprietary software to flourish for some time.

I would have expected a definition of software copyright and what is offered instead is a curious retrospective, wishful, unsupported claim about the alleged decline of proprietary software. Please help to make this article less NPOV. Cheers. --Edcolins 19:35, August 26, 2005 (UTC)

I changed that sentence to read "has allowed", so it now does not suggest that the proprietary software market has dissipated. I've left the NPOV tag, though, until someone can look at the rest of the article more thoroughly. ArthurDenture 18:49, 16 October 2005 (UTC)

This article is unlikely ever to be completely unbiased due to the complicated nature of the subject and the many points of view. This problem is exacerbated by the practice of posting the arguments against software copyright on a separate page, which are also tagged NPOV. Possibly a way to solve this would be simply to post a clear indication of this fact within the context of the page itself, as well as at the end of the article, which sometimes is not donePhil alias Harry 23:25, 3 November 2005 (UTC)23:24, 3 November 2005 (UTC) (sorry, i was for some reason not logged in when i hit the save button)

- Keanu Reeves

I have checked this article for any inaccuracies and can now confirm that it is correct. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 84.92.152.221 (talk • contribs) 14:54, 7 September 2006 (UTC)

Wow, this is just about the worst wikipedia article I've ever read. There's not even a summary of what software copyrights govern--it just skips into crap right away. I'm not especially qualified, but can someone who is please clean this up?

This article screams POV. I've tagged it as such and am endeavoring to clean up.--Nowa 21:56, 11 May 2007 (UTC)

Tags

I've attempted to remove POV, clean up article and add more of world view. OK to remove tags?--Nowa 01:59, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

I would say leave the tags until you are done and everyone agrees. If I can help I will try and find information on the subject and that is not straight legal jargon. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Robotboy2008 (talk • contribs) 07:17, 14 November 2007 (UTC)

added " and because programs were regarded as a simple list of instructions for the computer to process and hence not copyrightable". if that needs to be rendered into legalese someone conversant should do it. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 69.125.110.223 (talk) 21:12, 2 January 2008 (UTC)

yes this is quite true but it is hard to show a broad overview of everyones opinions in what is meant to be a factual page. How is fact meant to be displayed if everybody has different opinions? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.68.207.185 (talk) 19:29, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Proposed reorganization

This page will be revised over the next week as part of the IP WikiProject. I intend to recast the overview in more descriptive terms, and then break the US section into subsections for history, rights retained by copyright holders, rights granted to others, etc. Asrabkin (talk) 23:18, 15 September 2009 (UTC) I will be helping with this edit over the next week as well as a part of the IP WikiProject.Justonlysteve (talk) 03:50, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

Okay. First round of editing is done. We'd like to remove the NPOV tag. Objections? Asrabkin (talk) 21:13, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Kelly v Arriba doesn't fit here

I don't think the material on Kelly v Arriba fits here. The topic of this article is "software copyright", and the copyright material at stake in Kelly was photographs. There's a pretty substantial page on Kelly, so I'm nuking the stuff here.

corporate conspiracy

stallman talks about it here: should that info be put somewhere? 89.216.192.218 (talk) 13:02, 2 August 2010 (UTC)

Too US-centric

I think that much of this article is too US-centric. The History section talks only about US law - and even assumes that the reader knows it's US law without mentioning it. Then later on, there's an Around the World section in which a few other countries get a mention, but once again the US is included. As a minimum, the History section should be moved to the US section of Around the World. Or maybe the article needs to be renamed Software copyright in the USA, with similar articles for other countries. Mandolamus (talk) 00:39, 8 May 2012 (UTC)

Software Copyright Law References

Copyright Codex is a free treatise on U.S. copyright law. Its a reorganized and updated version of Prof. Robert Gorman's Copyright Treatise for the Federal Judicial Center (also an excellent free reference).

The Copyright Codex pages on Software Copyright Infringement and Copyright in Software Code could be useful references for this article.

Copyright Codex is my own work, and I don't mean to be spammy. I'm just proposing it on the talk page, I'd never use it or link to it in any of my edits to the actual article. Teachingaway (talk) 16:26, 16 October 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the spammy-ness. The material you cited can still be found on archive.org — Preceding unsigned comment added by 72.22.12.35 (talk) 14:03, 24 August 2016 (UTC)

talk software copyright

find new section serves talk software copyrighte Nurhusien — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.55.73.53 (talk) 21:57, 11 November 2013 (UTC)

East Germany???

IANAL so I won't edit the page - but is East Germany still relevant now it has been reunited with the rest of the country, so is part of the EU? Number774 (talk) 11:21, 21 February 2019 (UTC)

"Copyrightable authorship in software"

@Lethargilistic: I noticed that you changed the section heading from "Copyrightable authorship in software" to "Copyrightable subject matter in software" with the edit summary Authorship is not copyrightable. Subject matter is. I reverted your edit because this subsection is not about whether software programs are within the subject matter of copyright (which is addressed in the lead section of Software copyright § United States), but which aspects of software are copyrightable. Indeed, the phrase copyrightable authorship is used in the title of a chapter of the Compendium of U.S. Copyright Office Practices. Let me know if you think a different section title would be better. Qzekrom (she/her • talk) 19:57, 23 July 2026 (UTC)

The Compendium (which is just one source) is using "authorship" there as a shorthand for "works of authorship". Authorship is a distinct concept from the work, so the term "copyrightable authorship" can be confusing. Besides, "Copyrightable subject matter" is a far more common term for this concept, compared to "copyrightable authorship." lethargilistic (talk) 20:08, 23 July 2026 (UTC)

The Compendium also uses the word "authorship" to describe the creative elements of a work, not just as part of the set phrase "work(s) of authorship":

• Words and short phrases, such as names, titles, and slogans, are not copyrightable because they contain a de minimis amount of authorship (p. 28 of chapter 300)
• the work contains at least a minimum amount of creative authorship that is original to the author (p. 10)

I would honestly expect "copyrightable expression" to be more common in the general literature, but the Compendium uses both terms (e.g. contains a sufficient amount of creative expression) and seems to prefer "authorship" overall. Both "authorship" and "expression" have alternative meanings that might be more familiar to the article's audience (cf. Authorship of the Bible, Expression (computer science)) than their legal meanings, but I think that using some technical term is likely unavoidable here, so we shouldn't shy away from the use of these words.

Also, it looks to me like "subject matter" refers to the categories of works that are copyrightable (e.g. a software program being a literary work) and to categories of potential subject matter that haven't been made copyrightable by Congress (e.g. Samuelson 2016, a genetically engineered fish is not copyrightable subject matter), so it's not the right term here.

This subsection is about what is and isn't a copyrightable element of software, so it covers both the idea-expression dichotomy and the problem of AI-assisted/generated code. I believe "authorship" is the most succinct term that encompasses the material in this subsection (copyright only protects the expression of an idea, algorithm, etc., and that expression must have a human author), but I'd also be okay with a title like "Copyrightable expression in software" or "Copyrightable elements of software". Qzekrom (she/her • talk) 04:22, 24 July 2026 (UTC)