101 of US copyright law. A computer program is protected by the law at all stages of its creation, including materials obtained during its development, regardless of the tangible form of its embodiment, be it entered into the computer memory, recorded on paper or any other way of storage. This is directly specified in pt. Thus, the only way at hand in Russia for the authors to protect their algorithms used in computer programs as independent intellectual property items is to extend the know-how status to the algorithms in accordance with art. 151 of the Fundamentals of civil legislation of the USSR and republics.
User interface is an aggregate of means used to facilitate interaction between a user and a program.
It is necessary, however, to clearly sort out criteria for protectability of interfaces. Second, the interface must meet general requirements of protectability applied to a work, i.e. efforts made to produce it must be original in character. The legislation does not specify objective criteria for deciding whether or not the author's effort in designing an interface is original in nature. The legislation also does not specify the extent and character of interface component borrowing which would be sufficient enough for recognizing that the the original author's copyright has been infringed upon. Questions of this nature are to be settled in court on an individual case basis.