Exceptions to Intellectual Property Protection

Not everything in software is subject to copyright or patent protection. It is possible to write software that is not protected by either. For our present purposes, these are the two most important exceptions:

  1. You cannot use copyright law to prevent someone from practicing the underlying ideas in the software. Copyright protects only expression. If there is only one way to implement an idea in software, anyone can copy the software unless it is also protected by patent (or by a trade secrecy restriction, something that never applies to open source software whose source code is published).

  2. Before you can use patent law to prevent someone from practicing the underlying ideas in the software, you must ...

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