Recent innovation in terms of technology has initiated the rise of the information component of goods. Apparently, the value of hardware persists on falling, while the price of software has intensified or has remained constant. This inclination will continue because manufacturing costs, a significant part of hardware costs, will continue to fall, while human brainpower costs, and consequently software costs, will keep rising.
Corporate scuffles in the software and integrated circuit milieu is high-priced and experts distinguish no speedy solution to the controversy. An apprehension is the amount of capital companies are spending on legal actions that could be put into research and development. Legal fees, even for small software companies, can run into six figures. And in this context, the developers of software placed in the middle of it. Although there is malpractice could not be pursued among the engineers, an apparent legal liability of a professional software engineer is the breach of intellectual property rights clause.
An engineer must be able to discern what technologies already exist and what among these are patented. Software is usually protected by copyrights, which protect expressions of ideas, while patents normally cover inventions. Copyrights are designed to protect the software code itself and the screens the user sees. Patents protect the underlying functionality. Patents are the strongest form of protection, providing several years of monopoly on an idea. Some companies have been successful using trade secrets to protect their ideas. While trade secrets provide less legal protection than patents and copyrights, the secrets are never published. Patents are published at the end of the protection period.
Software engineers are thus required to have a knowledge of the current technologies and those which is still developing to become safe from any unintentional replication of data. It is these patents and copyrights that protects and at the same time provides danger for software engineers among themselves.
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