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If the platform is not open-source, is the computer program copyrightable?

user90379
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    Please specify a location. It might depend on jurisdiction. For example, in the USA you can apply for software patents, while in the EU you cannot. I know copyright and patents are not the same thing, but it's an example how laws can vary across the globe. – vsz Jan 13 '20 at 05:49
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    Open source programs are copyrighted and depends on that copyright to enforce their open source licenses. Software that are not copyrighted are public domain and anyone can do anything they want with it including making it closed source – slebetman Jan 13 '20 at 07:27
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    I though software was only copyright in U.S. I've never heard of a patented software program? – marshal craft Jan 13 '20 at 12:19
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    I find this fascinating: "An illegal number is a number that represents information which is illegal to possess, utter, propagate, or otherwise transmit in some legal jurisdiction. Any piece of digital information is representable as a number; consequently, if communicating a specific set of information is illegal in some way, then the number may be illegal as well." – Rebecca J. Stones Jan 13 '20 at 14:03
  • You will need to provide a lot more information for the question to be answerable. For example, the mere definition of copyright varies a lot between jurisdictions, and the implications can be 100% different. Such as e.g. when you work for a company, you may have shared copyright on a work even if you created it alone according to some sketches, and in either case not the right to actually copy (as implied by the word copy-right) the work. Because the right to use (and copy) remains with the company you work for. OTOH, someone ordering a work may not be allowed to copy it either... – Damon Jan 13 '20 at 16:17
  • If, for example, I pay a lawyer to make a nice watertight contract for that little condo of mine, I have the right to use that contract, of course. But I am not allowed to copy that contract for my other 50 condos. If you work for Microsoft and write some revolutionary, awesome kernel code, you are technically the (possibly partial) copyright holder of that code, but you had better not submit that code to Linux sources (or even the general way it works) because your life will thereafter be very unhappy. Microsoft will of course copy that code, without asking you. – Damon Jan 13 '20 at 16:21
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    @slebetman There is no such thing as 'software that is not copyrighted'. Every authorial act is implicitly copyright to the author. There is only software that is explicitly public domain. – user207421 Jan 14 '20 at 09:13
  • @vsz it is usual to assume any copyright question's jurisdiction is under the Berne Convention (which both US and UK are). – OrangeDog Jan 15 '20 at 14:06

4 Answers4

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All computer programs are not just copyrightable, they are protected by copyright as soon as they are put into fixed form (for example, as soon as I type it on my computer which will save it as a file on a disk). The copyright owner doesn't have to take any actions whatsoever to have a computer program protected by copyright. It’s not just computer programs, even many fonts are copyrighted because they are essentially computer programs.

BTW. What I just wrote is also protected by copyright. There are some licenses involved that I agreed to when I submitted it to this website, and which allow the website to publish and you to read this text, but I'm the copyright holder.

PS. There is a comment saying “computer programs are not literary works and therefore not copyrightable”. That may have been true or arguable in the 1980’s. It’s not true now.

PS. No, stack exchange doesn’t own the copyright to my post, I do. Unless I was an employee of the company and posted on their behalf. Stack exchange needs and has a license to publish this post.

gnasher729
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    Might be worth adding "All" at the start of this (to make it explicit that programs on an opensource platform are copyright. – Martin Bonner supports Monica Jan 12 '20 at 17:08
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    @gnasher729 Please consider including an authoritative reference to support the first sentence. – gatorback Jan 12 '20 at 18:43
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    @gatorback one such source is Art 4 of the WIPO Treaty “Computer programs are protected as literary works within the meaning of Article 2 of the Berne Convention” in conjunction with Art 2(2) of the Berne Convention, which allows (but doesn't require) that signatories require the work to be fixed in some material form first. – amon Jan 12 '20 at 20:12
  • Wrong se owns it not you. That's what you agreed to and anyone whos tried to remove their account and the work theyve submitted will have realized. – marshal craft Jan 13 '20 at 12:22
  • And programs aren't literrary works because they do an exact thing precisely defined. Much simpler then literature. – marshal craft Jan 13 '20 at 12:23
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    @marshalcraft: No the answer here is correct. The secenario you describe is due to the license you agreed when you posted. The license cannot be revoked, so SE may continue to use the content. However, SE are not considered the original creator of the content and do not "own" it in that sense. They cannot relicense it in any way incompatible with the Creative Commons license for instance, but the original author can. – Neil Slater Jan 13 '20 at 12:42
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    ... but one should note that not every site that publishes user contributions follows SE's model. Some do include terms in their user agreements specifying that users transfer ownership of their contributions to the site. Since they do vary, one really ought to take care to know and understand such details of one's user agreements before making such contributions. – John Bollinger Jan 13 '20 at 14:14
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    Also, @marshalcraft, nobody said that programs are literary works, but it is a matter of established law in most countries that programs, both in source form and in binary form, are protected by copyright in the same way that literary works are. It sounds like you may be confusing copyright with patents, which are quite a different -- and less settled -- matter. – John Bollinger Jan 13 '20 at 14:20
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    @NeilSlater - They already did. They took some content of mine that I uploaded under CC BY-SA 3.0 and now they are relicensing this under CC BY-SA 4.0 without any additional negotiation with me. – Jirka Hanika Jan 13 '20 at 20:29
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    @JirkaHanika, one could certainly claim that CC BY-SA 4.0 is in some way or another incompatible with CC BY-SA 3.0, according to a natural-language sense of the term "compatible". CC has a specific definition of "compatible" as it applies to their v3.0 and later licenses, however, and according to this, CC BY-SA 4.0 is compatible with CC BY-SA 3.0. The terms of BY-SA v3.0 (and v4.0) specifically allow relicensing under licenses that are compatible in this sense. – John Bollinger Jan 14 '20 at 07:40
  • @NeilSlater No. To cite my own answer from the question you linked: “Note that this only applies to Adaptations in the sense of the license: you may use a compatible license or later license version for your Adaptations, but cannot relicense the original work.” My most charitable interpretation of SE's relicensing is that the ToS grant a CC license from the user to SE but without specifying a version, thus allowing any version. But I don't actually believe that. – amon Jan 14 '20 at 08:25
  • @amon: OK, I see that https://wiki.creativecommons.org/wiki/4.0/Treatment_of_adaptations clarifies that. I stand corrected. And SE should by rights present the original license link for older content. However, that doesn't change the correctness of my first comment, and is not relevant to this answer or marshalcraft's criticisms of it – Neil Slater Jan 14 '20 at 09:04
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    @JohnBollinger - Aggregate works are actually exempt from that option. CC BY-SA 3.0 point 1(b) says "A work that constitutes a Collection will not be considered an Adaptation (as defined below) for the purposes of this License." Terms of CC BY-SA 4.0 are irrelevant because I never consented for anyone to apply it to my work. – Jirka Hanika Jan 14 '20 at 10:10
  • @JirkaHanika: And, because you never consented for your older postings to be relicenced under CC BY-SA 4.0, they remain under CC BY-SA 3.0, regardless of SE's wanting them to be under CC BY-SA 4.0. The only SE postings of yours that are under CC BY-SA 4.0 are the ones you originally posted after the Great Licence Switch. – Vikki Jan 15 '20 at 01:14
  • Regarding the last PS above, stack exchange doesn't own the post, and doesn't even try to claim exclusive or complete rights over posts - Stack Exchange is very reasonable - but there are some sites that do try to claim exclusive ownership of the material post. Whether this is legally binding is another matter and I suspect in many cases it isn't. – tomr Jan 15 '20 at 05:32
  • @JohnBollinger and others: more details – OrangeDog Jan 15 '20 at 12:27
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    @Sean it gets complicated. Simply by claiming otherwise SE may have violated their grant of 3.0, instantly invalidating it. I think full legal proceedings would be necessary to work out exactly what that means. – OrangeDog Jan 15 '20 at 14:10
  • Fonts are copyrighted not just because they are "essentially computer programs", but because they are creative works. As far as I understand, you have to go out of your way to rescind your economic rights (using something like cc-zero). – Stefano Palazzo Jan 21 '20 at 18:19
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Except for limited circumstances, all computer programs are protected by copyright (an exception would be a program created by the US government). Therefore, to overcome copyright protection, the creator must grant a license to others to use and redistribute software with some specified degree of freedom. This is what gave rise to the myriad open source licenses. "Platform" might mean, e.g., distribution repository, operating system, or hardware. I don't know of any effective restriction (open vs. closed) on software copyright related to OS or hardware, but it is easy to limit distribution repositories so that, for example, "by uploading a program you grant any user total freedom to use and re-sell your software" or "by uploading a program you grant the repository an unlimited license to do what they want" (not actually good licenses, just there to illustrate the possibilities).

jwodder
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user6726
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In addition to the copyright itself as answered in the other answers, it is worth noting that while the code itself falls under copyright, WHAT the program does is usually not part of the copyright.

Thus if you have implemented a program A to read data from an image and search for specific patterns in it your program itself is protected.

BUT if someone has a similar idea on how to do things, or manages to read your program code and then use that to implement program B which does the same thing (only with a slightly different code), this is normally NOT protected by the "automatic" copyright of program A (as it was not program A that was copied, but B consists only of code that has the same "idea" and "result" not the same "way").

This is at least the case within the EU. IF it is the same anywhere else (US as example) I'm not aware of.

Thomas
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    Like so many others, this 'answer' considerably confuses the concepts of 'copyright' and 'patentability'. – MikeB Jan 13 '20 at 16:46
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    @MikeBrockington care to expand on the confusion you're seeing? – TheLuckless Jan 13 '20 at 23:46
  • @TheLuckless Okay: "WHAT the program does is usually not part of the copyright" - not correct, what the program does is covered by patentability (or not) but never copyright. – MikeB Jan 14 '20 at 10:49
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    @MikeBrockington Since the question is very short, it is safe to assume that many people coming to this page will also confuse copyright/patents/intellectual property. So a good answer should address the differences and that only a concrete work (like the lines of text forming the code) can be copyrighted, while the algorithm/idea behind it can be subject to patent laws, but not copyright. And the blurry line, if I write the same program as yours, just with different variable names or in a different programming language... – Falco Jan 14 '20 at 11:00
  • @MikeBrockington that "not" is what I had meant there. At least in the EU I know it is so. I chose "usually" as wording there as I am not sure about the appropriate laws there in the US or other countries. if a similar ruling as it is in the EU can be seen as the standard worldwide I can rephrase it accordingly to a "hard not". – Thomas Jan 14 '20 at 11:04
  • For the patentability of programs....I see that as pandoras box really. The laws seem to differ from country to country in a great amount and additionally the rulings are....confusing to me. Sometimes it is allowed to have a general "I use digital programs to create faces dyanmically" patent that is acceptable and holds up in courts...and at other times.....it is laughed upon and courts say "ok guys try it with something different". At least from what I read on news. As the question itself was about copyright, I thus stayed with the copyright part and avoided the patents in addition to above. – Thomas Jan 14 '20 at 11:06
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    @MikeBrockington I find your comment confusing. Are you claiming that the answer is wrong, and that what the program does IS covered by copyright? – barbecue Jan 14 '20 at 19:49
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It depends on what you mean by "computer program".

If you're referring to the algorithm that the computer operates, no, you can't copyright it, because it's a process or a system of rules, and those can't be copyrighted. However, if you're talking about the specific expression of an implementation of that process, then that can be copyrighted.

So, for instance, I could find an open source program that was implemented in Java, study it, then code my own proprietary version in Python that implements the exact same algorithms and procedures in a different language, and that wouldn't violate copyright. This has been done a number of time in the pen-and-paper RPG space, for instance - there have been a number of different retroclones of different editions of Dungeons and Dragons that use new wordings to express the same rules without violating copyright.

Community
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nick012000
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  • The process or system of rules that make up a game show can be copyrighted. So what happens if you release your algorithm as a game show first? – Paul McCarthy Jan 14 '20 at 13:33
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    @PaulMcCarthy Can the system of rules that make up a game show be copyrighted? I don't believe so. Do you have a cite? – prosfilaes Jan 14 '20 at 14:38
  • Sorry you are correct, it is the logos, scripts and other related material that can be copyrighted, but not the actual rules/format. This begs the question, how is Simon Cowell still on tv? – Paul McCarthy Jan 14 '20 at 14:48
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    I'm not sure that studying a program and then writing your own version wouldn't violate copyright. That could arguably be a derivative work. That's why, although reverse engineering is perfectly legal, companies that reverse engineer software owned by other companies with expensive lawyers follow a "clean room" approach: one team decompiles the software and describes the algorithms in natural language, then an entirely separate team reimplements those algorithms without ever seeing the original code. – StackOverthrow Jan 14 '20 at 17:16
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    @PaulMcCarthy he settled out of court with the "owner" of the Pop Idol format. – OrangeDog Jan 15 '20 at 14:14