A new perspective on United States software development, seen through the patent battles that shaped our technological landscape This first comprehensive history of software patenting explores how patent law made software development the powerful industry that it is today. Historian Gerardo Con Díaz reveals how patent law has transformed the ways computing firms make, own, and profit from software. He shows that securing patent protection for computer programs has been a central concern among computer developers since the 1950s and traces how patents and copyrights became inseparable from software development in the Internet age. Software patents, he argues, facilitated the emergence of software as a product and a technology, enabled firms to challenge each other’s place in the computing industry, and expanded the range of creations for which American intellectual property law provides protection. Powerful market forces, aggressive litigation strategies, and new cultures of computing usage and development transformed software into one of the most controversial technologies ever to encounter the American patent system.

This book combines an authoritative interpretation of the EC Council Directive on the legal protection of software adopted in May 1991, with a practitioner's view on how to deal with the issues it raises for industry and the legal profession. Legal Protection of Computer Programmes in Europe provides a valuable comparison of the Directive to the corresponding laws of the US, Japan and Eastern Europe and should prove of great use to all those who are legal advisers to software developers and distributors, as well as to those in the software industry itself involved in the drafting of licences.

The first few years of the 90s have been extremely important for the development of software copyright both in the United States and Europe. In the United States, major decisions redefined the idea/expression dichotomy in different cases. In Europe, countries are still in the process of harmonizing their national laws with the EC Software Directive. The study compares traditional and evolving copyright standards as applied to computer programs on both sides of the Atlantic. It may well be said that recent case law has brought America closer to Europe. On the other hand, American experience turns out to be a useful guideline for distinguishing between the concepts of idea and expression in the sense of the software directive.