What is it about?
Software cloning is the activity which creates a piece of software copying part of another software. Software Cloning impacts Intellectual Propriety Rights. We study some legal decisions concerning software clones. In particular, we survey the behavior of some major courts in USA and in Europe about cloning issues. The US and European contexts differ because in USA software is patentable while in the EU software patents are not granted. Hence, European courts look more permissive regarding cloning, since "principles" or "ideas" are not copyrightable by themselves.
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Why is it important?
This work is important because the legal issues concerning software cloning impact several software products. We compare the US and European Courts case laws and discuss the impact of some recent European rulings.
Perspectives
Software development is a social activity, thus it is influenced by the law, in particular by the Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) legal framework. The IPR laws are different in US and in Europe, and this difference should be made clear to developers of software products for these markets.
dr. Paolo Ciancarini
Universita degli Studi di Bologna
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: A guided tour of the legal implications of software cloning, May 2016, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/2889160.2889220.
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