Individual property law implement through Patent right.

The intellectual property in software can be protected three ways: patents, copyrights and trade secrets. Patents protect "inventions" that are useful, nonobvious and novel Most software are, innovative rather than inventive so Patent is out of the question..

Copytight Copyright law applies to "works of authorship" Thus, the code of virtually all software is automatically protected by copyright.

Trade Secret. Tade secret law protects any information that is not "commonly known" and which the company has taken reasonable steps to keep in confidence. The protection is more limited than patent and copyright protection: Trade secret law prevents only misappropriation, which means wrongful taking. Trade secret law could protect secrets in the source code of the software, for example.

Difference of legal and technical views According to the copy-right law, software is a literary work, but not a useful object. And Copyright law only protects the code of software and not its behavior. To the copyright scholar, a crucial characteristic of software is its creation in the medium of text; the fact that that text happens to do something useful is irrelevant and two programs with different codes with identical behaviors can exist without any legal obligation. Software Software is written to do something and their behavior and code text are loosely connected. For example two programs with different texts can produce identical behavior. Expressive behavior (I.e gaming and entertainment software) is appropriately covered by existing copyright law; but the problematic part is utilitarian behavior of software. One essential element of copyright is that the work be expressive, that is, artistic rather than functional. Copyright does not cover useful objects, or even the useful parts of a decorative object.

The fundamental mismatch is now easily seen: If much of the value in software is in its useful behavior, copyright is a fundamentally inappropriate mechanism because it does not protect useful behavior. If most software is innovative rather than inventive, most software is not patentable, and therefore most value in software cannot be protected using patents. If software bears much of its know-how on its face, trade secret protection cant work, for we can rarely keep the improvement a secret. Copyright protection is still useful, of course, because there is value in the literal text of a program, but thats only a part of the value.

Conclusion: Any framework should be designed to protect the sources of value in software. Traditional copyright protection for literal code; Protection against behavior clones for a market preserving period; cloning of software innovation copying innovative behavior and design be restricted for a brief, market-preserving period of time. A software developer might register a new user interface design or an innovation (the developer would not have to register the product as a whole) that will provide cloning protection for a definite period of time for that particular Interface design or inovation