A critical review of proprietary software protection

The purpose of this paper is to delineate primarily the present state of U.S. patents, copyright and trade secrets to the area of computer software. These three areas were chosen because the protection afforded by them is the greatest and because the application of these laws is pretty much unique as applied to software. A brief mention will be given to the law of contracts (contractual agreements), but an analysis of this area is not required because the application of the law of contracts to software is not unique. The paper ends with a brief look at the Doctrine of Unfair Competition, ethical considerations and finally presenting various proposals that have been made to help rectify the problem of proprietary software protection.