Back in the late 1960s, the trend of “unbundling” software from hardware lead to a significant expansion of the software industry and triggered a clear necessity for the introduction of legal mechanisms for protection of computer programs. A central issue in the debates that followed in the next decades was whether legal protection should be…Continue reading

The core purpose of granting patent rights is not only to reward the inventor but above all to create strong incentives for innovation across all sectors of the economy. It is because of such incentives that we are seeing increased investments in new technology and more pronounced trends of commercialization of groundbreaking products and processes.…Continue reading

Back in the 1960s computer programs did not have the status of standalone products. They were written specifically for a given mainframe computer and were bundled together with the hardware as an offering to the end customers. Accordingly, computer programs had a secondary role as mere accessories to hardware. This started to change at the…Continue reading

Nowadays, the copyright system is the dominant legal framework for protection of computer programs. However, this was not always the case. Back in the 1970s, there was strong competition between the patent and copyright systems for taking the throne in governing IP protection of software. Copyright was deemed a good fit as computer programs in…Continue reading

A software license resembles a rental agreement. The vendor retains ownership of the intellectual property rights in the software but grants a third party with a limited right to use it for a certain period of time. However, not all licensing models are created equal. Significant differences exist between the traditional licensing model of proprietary…Continue reading

Over the course of the last four decades the video games industry has seen rapid growth and expanse. In 2019 the global video games market was valued at 151 billion dollars and the expectation for it is to reach a value of more than 250 billion dollars by 2025. For the last 40 years computer…Continue reading

One of the most common forms of IP infringement when it comes to computer software is unauthorized copying. Such copying represents a violation of the exclusive reproduction right of the copyright holder. The exclusive reproduction right gives the rightholder the power to authorize or prohibit direct or indirect, temporary or permanent reproduction by any means…Continue reading

In general, the concept of open source is built upon three key tenets – i) the open source technology, ii) the open source community that stands behind it and iii) the open source licenses that regulate the use of that technology. These three elements are intertwined together to produce a phenomenon that provides significant benefits…Continue reading

What is copyleft? Copyleft is one of the most important concepts when it comes to distributing free and open-source software (FOSS). Before elucidating what copyleft is, we need to take a step back and take a quick look at the general concept of free and open source software. FOSS is known for the provision of…Continue reading

Back in 2010 the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) was faced with an intriguing question with regards the legal protection of graphical user interfaces (GUI) – Case C-393/09 Bezpečnostní softwarová asociace – Svaz softwarové ochrany v Ministerstvo kultury. The question raised before the CJEU was whether a GUI can be protected as…Continue reading