Do intellectual property laws accommodate advances in technology?
While a handful of basic concepts form the core principles of intellectual property law, the manner in which intellectual property laws are applied has changed over the years in order to accommodate advances in technology. Indeed, intellectual property laws often find their origin in technological advances. As mentioned above, the first copyright laws were spurred by the printing press and applied only to printed media. However, over the course of the last 300 years, copyright law has expanded to take into account such technological advances as photography, recorded music, the photocopy machine, and the Internet.
Yes, intellectual property laws do accommodate advances in technology. Most advances in technology require considerable intellectual material to be researched and developed into formal descriptions and models. While base academic information used to create most emerging technologies is not copyrightable, "Copyright protection is not available for ideas, program logic, algorithms, systems, methods, concepts, or layouts" [http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ61.pdf], the final form of the information embedded in technological creations is copyrightable in the USA [copyright.gov : FORM CO]. The non-copyrightable information stated in the above citation is primarily of an academic nature, items such as ‘program logic’ while not copyrightable in its base theory form, it is copyrightable in its applied code or binary implementation, for example: if the product of function A yields result B then execute C routine (is not copyrightable) its practical final form is copyrightable, for example [in C#]:
01 //Start program
02 const double laserFrequency = 3.1415;
03 const int waveLength = 42;
04 const int numberOfTimes = 2;
05 Boolean targetHit = false;
06
07 if ( IsReadyForFiring(laserFrequency, waveLength) == true )
08 {
09 Target target = getTarget();
10 fireLaser(target, numberOfTimes);
11 targetHit = wasTargetHit(target);
12 }
13 else
14 {
15 Notify("Laser not ready to fire. Press charge before firing.");
16 }
17 //End program
