Software and Law 2: Basics

Software has become an omnipresent force in our lives. It is used in all digital transactions, whether to sell something or to provide services to another party or for one's own internal purposes. 

It is pertinent to note that software, just like any other property, is proprietary in nature. That is, it is owned by someone and is protected by copyright. There are few legal principles that apply to a software which one has to keep in mind while using software -

Software, being "property", is protected by copyright. Copyright is the legal protection of code to prevent unauthorized use. Property such as books, arts, music, software programs are protected by copyright. Copyright protection arises automatically once the property comes into existence (i.e., developing a software, writing a book, printing a document etc..). Specific copyright marking is not required for copyright protection to apply. However, one may still choose to give copyright notice to the public. Now this means that anything you find on the internet is automatically protected by copyright, irrespective of the fact whether the copyright notice is provided to you. 

Software owner has the right to determine what one can or cannot do with the property. To be in compliance with this, one has to read the license agreement attached to the software. License agreement tells you what you can and cannot do with the software. License agreement is sometimes also referred to as "EULA", "End User License Agreement" or simply "Terms & Conditions". Few software also have these terms encapsulated within the software and can be accessed once the software is downloaded or may appear on the screen once the software is installed. These are oftentimes referred to as "Click-wrap" or "Shrink-wrap" agreements. Irrespective of the form in which these license agreements are provided, they hold the same weightage and significance and one should ensure that the terms provided therein are complied with. 

Software and Law - 1: Coding

Before we dive into the law surrounding software and technology, let us try to understand what "software" is. 

Often googling about this would give you results such as "Software is a set of instructions and documentations which tells a computer what to do". This is correct. But lets deep dive into it and understand this better. 

It is correct to say that software is a "set of instructions" provided to a computer. But how are these instructions provided to a computer? How do you tell your computer to do certain things? 

This is done by providing instructions to the computer in a code/language which it can understand. 

To do this, we begin by writing these "set of instructions" in human readable language using any text editor you have on your system. This process is called "Programming". 

Now Programming doesn't really care about the formatting such as bold/italic/underlined fonts, font size or type of font. It just needs simple plain text with a set of instructions which is in human readable form. This is called "Source Code".

Though writing source code doesn’t require any specific software or application, it can be beneficial if to write them on dedicated applications/editors which is designed for this purpose. Such source code editors have special characteristics in them which allows a programmer to type source codes with much ease. Just like how a word processor like Microsoft Word highlights the errors in your text, a source code editor highlights the errors in programming. 

Computers only understand ones and zeros i.e., binary code. This corresponds to "on" and "off" state in computers. Once we have our source code, it is then converted/compiled/combined into binary code which a computer can understand.