• Some maintain that intellectual property rights are crucial incentives for software innovators.compact discs image by tim elliott from Fotolia.com
  
  Software provides internal operating directions for the use of a digital computer, or for use by a digital computer toward a given purpose.
  
  Whether software ought to be patentable at all is a matter of intense debate in many countries, including the United States and Germany. Patent protection is the most exclusive form of intellectual property, so the stakes there are the highest. In general, there are fewer objections to copyright or trademark protections for software, although there, too, hotly contested issues arise.
  
  

Patents

• The high courts of the U.S. and Germany have taken different approaches.map of germany image by Goran Bogicevic from Fotolia.com
  
  On Apr. 22, 2010, the high court in Germany upheld a patent on client-server software for automatic generation of structured documents, such as HTML or XML, against the objection that as software, it isn't patentable. It remanded the case to a lower court for the consideration of whether there are other objections to this patent, such as prior art.
  
  The U.S. Supreme Court, on the other hand, is moving in the opposite direction. On June 28, 2010, in Bilski v. Kappos, the Court held that a claimed invention of a process by which commodity buyers and sellers can hedge against the risks of price changes in the market for energy commodities is not patentable. Although the case before it did not directly involve software, the court's opinion, and even more especially Justice Stevens' concurrence, expressed skepticism about very broad notions of patentability. Stevens warned against rules so wide they would force businesses either to live in constant fear of litigation or to sustain significant costs searching through patents "attempting to determine whether their innovation is one that remains in the public domain."
  
  

Copyrights

• Software copyrights are less controversial than software patents. One issue that commonly arises when copyright law is applied to software involves the "fair use" doctrine. As with a literary work, so with a computer program: making "fair use," as for educational purposes, is a defense to a charge of copyright infringement.
  
  In a 1992 decision, the U.S. Ninth Circuit found that copying for the purpose of reverse engineering can be fair use. A program can be copied so it can be studied, and the copiers can develop a program of their own (not the copy) that performs analogous functions or is interoperable with the copyrighted material.
  
  

Trademarks

• In trademark law, the key issue is always whether the alleged infringement creates a likelihood of confusion between two products in the minds of consumers.
  
  In 1967, Checkpoint Systems, a manufacturer of electronic security control systems, registered "CHECKPOINT" with the U.S. Trademark Office.
  
  In 1993, Check Point Software was founded. By 1997 it was a leader in the computer firewall market and it expanded into networking and encryption.
  
  Although Checkpoint Systems complained of a trademark violation, the Third Circuit Court of Appeals held for the defendant largely on the ground that Check Point's consumers are sophisticated and thus unlikely to confuse the two products.