Copyright in software
The special regime for software: what is protected and what stays free, originality, ownership between employer, employee, intern and freelancer, duration, the reduced moral right, the user's rights and filing as proof.
- 20 cards
- 4 topics
- Free
The outline, topic by topic
Each topic is weighted the way the exam weighs it.
- Concepts
- Questions
- Sort and link
- Scenarios
A few cards from the deck
Originality: what is it?
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A condition for protection: the creation bears the stamp of its author's personality, who made free and creative choices.
For software, it is assessed in the author's creative effort and personal intellectual contribution: code dictated purely by technical constraints or copied is not original.
A competitor rewrites from scratch a program that offers exactly the same functions as yours. What does copyright let you object to?
- Nothing: functionalities are not protected
- Infringement, because the functions make up the program's value
- Infringement, because the algorithm is taken identically
- A breach of the first program's author's moral right
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Nothing: functionalities are not protected
Copyright protects expression, that is the code and its design, not functions or algorithms. An independent rewrite copies nothing protected.
Copyright protects a program's … (source code, object code, preparatory design work), not its ideas, algorithms or functionalities.
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Copyright protects a program's expression (source code, object code, preparatory design work), not its ideas, algorithms or functionalities.
Two programs can offer the same functions with different code: only code copied from the other is infringement.
Devolution to the employer: what is it?
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The rule under which the economic rights in software created by an employee in the course of their duties or on the employer's instructions belong to the employer.
It applies without a written assignment, to an employee or public servant within their duties. A freelancer is not covered, nor is an intern, unless hosted by a research organisation, which the law has treated alike since 2021.
A company pays a freelancer for an app, with no assignment clause. The contract says nothing about rights. Who holds the rights, and what should be done?
- The freelancer; get a written assignment listing the rights
- The company, which paid; nothing to do
- The company, under devolution to the employer; nothing to do
- Nobody, the code having entered the public domain; publish a licence
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The freelancer; get a written assignment listing the rights
Payment does not transfer rights: a freelancer is not an employee, so the author stays the holder. The company has only a fragile implied right of use until a precise assignment is signed.