h companies and individuals.
Software is protected mostly by the Copyright Act of 1976, which protects "original works of authorship fixed in any tangible medium of expression ... from which they can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device." The 1980 Amendments to the Act classified computer programs as "literary works." However, copyright protection of computer programs has always been problematic. Copyright protection has always been available only for a work's "expression" and not its "idea;" determining the exact point at which an "idea" is copyrightable as an "expression" is very difficult when the work is a computer program. While a computer program is first created as a series of written commands, its practical value lays in the accomplishment of its intended function, which some have said is the "idea" of the program. Others have said that this characterization is too simplistic.
In 1992, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals formulated a test to be applied to computer software in order to determine whether its copyright has been infringed upon. First, an "abstractions" test is applied to see if the program is copyrightable. First articulated by Judge Learned Hand in 1930, the abstractions test looks at the layers of "abstractions" upon which the components of a program are constructed; at some point in this series of abstractions the succeeding abstractions are no longer protected for they consist of the "idea" of the work. The second part of the test, the successive filtering method, screens the program's components at each level of abstraction to determine the copyrighta
...