Copyright, intellectual property and innovation Essay

Copyright, intellectual property and innovation - Essay Example It can be difficult for a developer to prove a new piece of software is theirs, especially when an unscrupulous competitor starts claiming they made it, and claiming huge amounts of money from the developer. Property rights are a complete nightmare for the small company or ordinary person who simply wants to develop software for its own sake and wishing to make a small profit while doing so. Copyright is one area of protection that should be straightforward, but it is not. Patenting software seems a good idea, but this can be difficult, time consuming and expensive. Intellectual property rights means’ software has to be proven to be unique, which is not always possible at the start of a project where such thinking may not even occur. For as the project begins, from the moment the first code is written and an idea aired, there is the danger of theft. For the public who want to use the software, there are problems not of their making in all the property rights, such as serious t ime delays in getting something up to date and useful for them. Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) have only been in existence since 1967, and software has only been recognised as needing protection since the late 1970’s, before that it was not considered very important and was usually supplied by the company who built the hardware as a complete entity. Once it was realised that software could be a separate product with its own market value, and then it started to become important to protect it. Later the type of thing that could be protected was argued over by software companies unclear as to what was in the common domain and what was completely theirs. A few years ago there was a massive argument between Apple computers and Microsoft over the use of the Trash Can in their respective operating systems. Apple claiming their right to it as their invention and Microsoft saying it was something in the public domain, needed by any operating system. The argument went