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 sufficiency of disclosure, enabling discl ...
or
copyright
A copyright is a type of intellectual property that gives its owner the exclusive legal 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, ...
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, end-user.
The practice of selling licenses to rather than copies of software predates the recognition of software copyright, w ...
.
See also
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Legal aspects of computing
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Software copyright
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Software patent
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Software license
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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, end-user.
The practice of selling licenses to rather than copies of software predates the recognition of software copyright, w ...
*
Proprietary software
Proprietary software is computer software, software that grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing t ...
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Free and open source software
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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