How does a court determine the difference between the ideas and expressions in a computer program?
In order to separate out those elements of a computer program that should be considered original expression from the unprotectable ideas and processes, courts utilize the Abstraction, Filtration, and Comparison test described in the case of Computer Associates v. Altai. [982 F.2d 693 (2d Cir. 1992)] Under this test, the court is required to go through the following steps to determine whether copyright infringement occurred: • Retrace the designer’s steps in the reverse order of its creation into manageable components in order to identify the unprotected ideas at each level of abstraction. • Filter out the non-protectable elements, including those dictated by efficiency (the most efficient implementation of any given task) , merger (when there is only one way to express an idea), external factors (necessity of matching standards), and elements taken from the public domain (expressions not protected by intellectual property). • Compare the allegedly infringing work and the initial work t
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