TY - GEN T1 - Intellectual property protection AU - Williamson, Tatiana AU - Sanfilippo, James AB - Suppose you have written a program that is better than any other available software. There may be a growing demand for your program. If so, then what do you do next? In common terms, intellectual property is any product of works of the mind that the law protects from unauthorized use by others. The ownership of intellectual property essentially creates a limited use by others of the protected property. A software developer has several options for his newly created or updated software program. This paper discusses only three ways but there are more protective ways than that. A creator can protect his Intellectual property by copyright, patent or leave it as an open source. An open source code has many beneficial uses. Also it is made available for public use and it can be modified by others to meet new needs. This way the software improves and problems can be identified and fixed. Copyrights and patents are laws that grant rights to the owner of intellectual property. Copyright law enables software developers to protect an expression of an idea and it allows for some protection on a literal level but it also allows competitors to design around the idea by expressing it differently to achieve the same functionality [1]. “Patent law, on the other hand, gives the patentee exclusive rights to the underlying processes and inventive features, thereby offering a more robust mechanism to protect the actual invention expressed in the source code and the object code [2].” Since a Copyright is less protective for software than a patent, more programmers are finding patents to be a better choice for effective protection of software-related programs. DA - 2015-3-31 PY - 2024 PB - unav ER -