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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 of distinctive issues that arise with software.
A patent applicant may include a copyright notice or mask work notice, but only if it also includes the following authorization, expressly permitting the reproduction of the patent: [9] A portion of the disclosure of this patent document contains material which is subject to (copyright or mask work) protection.
The concrete effect of strong vs. weak copyleft has yet to be tested in court. [26] Free-software licenses that use "weak" copyleft include the GNU Lesser General Public License and the Mozilla Public License. The GNU General Public License is an example of a license implementing strong copyleft.
A software patent is a patent on a piece of software, such as a computer program, library, user interface, or algorithm.The validity of these patents can be difficult to evaluate, as software is often at once a product of engineering, something typically eligible for patents, and an abstract concept, which is typically not.
The copyright symbol, or copyright sign, designated by (a circled capital letter "C"), is the symbol used in copyright notices for works other than sound recordings.
The Creative Commons icon for Share-Alike, a variant of the copyleft symbol. Copyleft is a distinguishing feature of some free software licenses. Many free software licenses are not copyleft licenses because they do not require the licensee to distribute derivative works under the same license.
The software patent debate is the argument about the extent to which, as a matter of public policy, it should be possible to patent software and computer-implemented inventions. Policy debate on software patents has been active for years. [ 1 ]
Stallman chose the phrase to identify his free software method of distribution. [4] It is often accompanied by a reversed version of the copyright symbol. [5] That said, the use of the reversed copyright symbol is considered legally risky by the Free Software Foundation. [6]