Software law refers to the legal remedies available to protect software-based assets. Software may, under various circumstances and in various countries, be restricted by
patent
A patent is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the legal right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for a limited period of time in exchange for publishing an enabling disclosure of the invention."A p ...
or
copyright
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive right to copy, distribute, adapt, display, and perform a creative work, usually for a limited time. The creative work may be in a literary, artistic, education ...
or both. Most commercial software is sold under some kind of
software license agreement
An end-user license agreement or EULA () is a legal contract between a software supplier and a customer or end-user, generally made available to the customer via a retailer acting as an intermediary. A EULA specifies in detail the rights and restr ...
.
See also
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Legal aspects of computing
Information technology law (also called cyberlaw) concerns the law of information technology, including computing and the internet. It is related to legal informatics, and governs the digital dissemination of both ( digitized) information and s ...
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Software copyright Software copyright is the application of copyright in law to machine-readable software. While many of the legal principles and policy debates concerning software copyright have close parallels in other domains of copyright law, there are a number o ...
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Software patent
A software patent is a patent on a piece of software, such as a computer program, libraries, user interface, or algorithm.
Background
A patent is a set of exclusionary rights granted by a state to a patent holder for a limited period of time, u ...
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Software license
A software license is a legal instrument (usually by way of contract law, with or without printed material) governing the use or redistribution of software. Under United States copyright law, all software is copyright protected, in both source ...
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Software license agreement
An end-user license agreement or EULA () is a legal contract between a software supplier and a customer or end-user, generally made available to the customer via a retailer acting as an intermediary. A EULA specifies in detail the rights and restr ...
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Proprietary software
Proprietary software is software that is deemed within the free and open-source software to be non-free because its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner exercises a legal monopoly afforded by modern copyright and int ...
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Free and open source software
Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...
References
*Frederic William Neitzke. A Software Law Primer. Van Nostrand Reinhold. 1984
Google*Robert Gomulkiewicz. Software Law and its Application. Aspen Publishing. 2023
Google
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