Software Protection Under Copyright Law

Under the copyright laws, protection is available only to the form or expression of an idea and not to the idea itself. The object of copyright protection in a computer program is not the underlying idea, but the computer language used to express that idea. The coding of the program is carried out independently. In this case, the idea underlying the program has expressed this idea. The new code thus constitutes the expression and is protected but the methods and algorithms within a program are not protected. Algorithm is a list of well-defined instructions for completing a task. It is a set of instructions on what steps are essential to process information by the computer and in what specific order it has to perform these operations in order to carry out a specified task.