Wishing to recoup anticipated losses caused by unauthorized copying, programmers will charge high prices for their software. Depriving a programmer of earnings is wrong not only because of undesirable ramifications, but because it is unjust and unfair. The obligation is absolute, not broken merely at the discretion of the private-end user. We must ask what we ought to do, not just what is profitable. Copyright protects expression but not underlying ideas.
Patents protect useful processes, machines, and compositions of matter.
Thus, computer programs fall somewhere between the traditional territories of copyright and patent. In 1960s, the Patent Office granted some patents for processes that where then in hardware but would now be in software, but did not grant patents for programs per se. Despite narrowness of ruling, Patent Office started to grant almost all applications for software patents. The Federal Circuit, in its decision In re Iwahashi, has effectively opened up the doors of the patent system to algorithms, contrary to Supreme Court decisions. Court held that the sequence and ordering of data was inseparable from the idea underlying the format and were thus not copyrightable.