But in order to obtain protection, there are certain hurdles to overcome. Firstly, as will be discussed further below, the patent system, unless utilised to the software owner's advantage, can be prohibitively expensive. Further, the patent system stops people using only those ideas not previously known to them. Hence, the software creator's own prior publications often invalidate any patent rights in those countries that do not provide for a grace period exemption to this rule. Copyright Copyright, on the other hand, is extremely inexpensive.
Worldwide protection is essentially instant and free.
Copyright tends to become the default form of protection of software due to its automatic and free creation as well as the fact that intellectual property rights are normally only considered for salvaging after a product has shown some promise in the market place and competitors have become interested. The significant drawback with copyright which substantially diminishes its value is that, in theory, it only protects the form of expression of the idea and not the core idea itself. The court dismissed the case on the basis that copyright did not extend to the functionality or idea of the particular user interface but merely to its actual form of representation and that Microsoft had not taken this representation. For example, they could have patented the idea of an icon, which, when clicked on by a mouse, resulted in a certain event taking place. Unfortunately for Apple, they had obtained most of their ideas for the Macintosh system from earlier Alto work by Xerox's PARC Laboratories.