Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

Posted Dec 2, 2004 16:39 UTC (Thu) by sepreece (guest, #19270)
In reply to: Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law) by mmarq
Parent article: Linus Torvalds gets software patents wrong, says attorney (Out-Law)

In US IP law, copyrights protect authors against direct copying of their "expressions", which could be words, code, musical notes, etc. Copyrights also protect against someone producing "derived works", such as translations into another language. However, they do not protect against someone expressing the same idea independently. Thus, I can tell you what a copyrighted book tells you, but I can't use the author's words. [This is an oversimplification, since the structure and purpose may also be important in determining whether a copyright is infringed, but it's the general principle.]

A patent, on the other hand, covers an idea and a method of implementing that idea. This is much broader protection, in most cases, than a copyright, because it covers the method, rather than just one expression of the method.

So, to answer your question, there could not be "software inventions without software code", but the code is just a single expression of the invention, so copyright would protect that code (and its derivatives) but would not protect the invention.