How does copyright protection differ from patent protection?
A copyright can protect the particular way in which ideas are expressed in a particular computer program. A copyright owner has the right to prevent others from making unauthorized, literal copies of a software program, but not from independently creating software that performs the same functions. A patent, on the other hand, grants an inventor exclusive rights in the technology. With a software patent, one may prevent others from making, using or selling a program that performs the same process or function as the patented technology, even if different code is used. Often, a software developer does not merely wish to rely on the prevention of verbatim copying of the software, since a competitor may observe the functions performed by the software, and without knowing the details of the software code underlying the functions, write equivalent code.
