The Legal Protection For Computer Software In China

Computer software is a product of the information age. With the popularization of computers and the high-speed development of digitized technology, the software industry comes into being and is widely used in every field of our life, bringing huge social benefits and economic benefits.As we know, a large amount of labor and material resources should be invested in the development of software, while it is very easy to reproduce the software for the expertise isn' t used. Therefore, the development of the software industry certainly would be influenced if the rights of software owner weren' t protected effectively. The establishment of a legal protection system for computer software will play a key role in the development of the computer software industry. Fortunately, the protection for computer software has attracted more and more attention. All countries around the world attach great importance to the legal protection of software in order to accelerate the development of the domestic software industry. Meanwhile, as an international industry, any country couldn' t develop the software industry independently, so it is required to communicate and coordinate among the countries in the course of software protection legislation. In this way, it will benefit the communication and cooperation of software technology. With China' s entry into WTO, software intellectual property protection is faced to new challenges: the demotic software protection legislation should both satisfy the requirements of the domestic software industry development and consider the international communication of software industry development.This paper explores the computer software, a special object of intellectual property. On the basis of explaining the concept and features of the computer software, firstly, the paper introduces the history of international computer software legal protection and analyzes the development of the computer software legal protection in U. S. A, Japan and the European Union representatively; secondly, the paper states the history of the domestic computer software legal protection and explains the principal means to protect computer software with the current Chinese laws and regulations, i.e. copyright protection, patent protection, trade secret protection, trademark protection and contract law protection; thirdly, the paper analyzes the advantages and disadvantages of the three leading legal protection means, i. e. copyright law, patent law, trade secret law; Last, the paper suggests that the computer software law protection system should be established in China. Because a new legislation protection system only for the computer software can' t be realized nowadays, it' s practical to build the integrated law protection system covering copyright law, patent law and trade secret law, which will protect the computer software in pursuance of the trademark and contract law according to the requirements of software industry development. In order to further improve the law protection for computer software, the paper discusses the end-users' legal liability stipulated in the "Computer Software Protection Regulations" and the approval of application for the memory medium related to the computer software patent. As for how the software enterprises select an appropriate law, the author suggests that they should master the above-mentioned computer software laws first, make sure of their advantages and disadvantages, and choose the best suitable legal protection combination for their own computer software according to the product features.