Computer Software Intellectual Property System Problem Research

Since the world's first electronic computer was invented, human society was transformed from the industrial economy to the knowledge-based economy. In the process of economic transition, the software industry, as a sunrise industry, seems to be even more influential than the hardware industry and has become one of the world's most profitable and fastest growing industries. It can be said that the development of the computer software industry represents a country's state of the art and will ultimately determine its international competitiveness and status in the 21st century in the world. Because of the significance of the software industry in the economic, scientific and technological fields, the studies of software's intellectual property legal system become one of the most important subjects of intellectual property law. At the same time complex, professional and international issues of software's intellectual property also make this subject a difficult point.Using comparative analysis and case analysis, the limitations of the existing intellectual property system of software will be discussed in this dissertation from two perspectives, the protection of rights and restrictions on the right abuses and also recommendations will be given to establish the software legal system in China.The first chapter summarizes the status quo of intellectual property protection of software around the world:in order to solve the issue of intellectual property protection of software, countries and international organizations conducted a number of explorations and, ultimately, reached an agreement on the copyright law legislation model as the international mainstream. By the comparison between copyright law and other intellectual property department laws, Section 2 concludes that the practice of copyright law model has its rationality and superiority in some points.Chapter 2 and 3 are the core of this dissertation, in which a conclusion is made, the practice of computer software intellectual property legal system under the model of copyright law is not appropriate, concerned about the deficiencies in the protection and the regulatory on right abuses of computer software, respectively. Chapter 2 reaches a conclusion that there are insurmountable flaws and contradictions in the model of copyright law to protect software due to copyright law's own limitations and the industrial characteristics of computer software, by the analysis of the protected object features, ideas-expression theory, the conflicts between the industrial characteristics of computer software and the traditional copyright legal system with two other American cases. Chapter 3 believes that the copyright law legislation model did not accomplish the assignment effectively to regulate the monopoly abuse of the computer software intellectual property as well, by the analysis of the Microsoft monopoly case and the practice of reverse engineering. At the end of this chapter, some pathways of the legal framework and main tips are given to the regulations.Finally, Chapter 4 puts forward several suggestions to set the China's legal system of software's intellectual property rights:First, the best legislative model of computer software intellectual property system in the future is the dependent legislation; second, the balance of interests are the coordinates in computer software intellectual property protection and abuse of regulatory system; third, China's position should be:concerned about the current status of Chinese software industry, the limitation of right abuse of computer software is more important than the protection of software's intellectual property rights.The innovations of this dissertation are following:above all, comparing with the former research which focused only on the protection of software's intellectual property, this dissertation calls that regulations to the right abuses should be much more considered. And the coordinates between protection and regulation is the balance of interests. Besides, based on the former explorations of legislation model of software's intellectual property, theoretical analysis and case analysis are used to conclude that the current copyright model has a good many limitations. Last but not least this dissertation predicts that the best legislative model in the future would be the dependent legislation model.