Software Licensing And Piracy

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and licensing.
Information can qualify to be property in two ways; patent law
and copyright laws which are creations of federal statutes, pursuant to
Constitutional grant of legislative authority. In order for the government
to prosecute the unauthorized copying of computerized information as theft,
it must first rely on other theories of information-as-property. Trade
secret laws are created by state law, and most jurisdictions have laws
that criminalize the violations of a trade-secret holder's rights in the
secret. The definition of a trade secret varies somewhat from state to
state, but commonly have the same elements. For example, AThe information
must be secret, Anot of public knowledge or of general knowledge in the
trade or business, a court will allow a trade secret to be used by someone
who discovered or developed the trade secret independently or if the
holder does not take adequate precautions to protect the secret.
In 1964 the United States ...

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The Copyright Act was amended to explicitly include
computer programs. Title 17 to the United States Code states that it is
illegal to make or to distribute copies of copyrighted material without
authorization, except for the user's right to make a single backup copy
for archival purposes. Any written material (including computer programs)
fixed in a tangible form (written somewhere i.e. printout) is considered
copyrighted without any additional action on the part of the author.
Therefore, it is not necessary that a copy of the software program be
deposited with the Copyright Office in Washington, D.C. for the program to
be protected as copyrighted. With that in mind then a copyright is ...

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