The legal protection of software

The applicable principle in French law is the legal protection of software by copyright (not patent as adopted in other jurisdictions). Principle laid down by Article L 112-2 13 of the Code of intellectual property "are considered as such intellectual works as defined in this code: ... software including the preparatory design material ..." ; The protection is granted without any formality of deposit at the inception of the software, provided that it is "original." In other words, and as the saying goes, "it bears the imprint of the personality of its author.

To establish the originality and the vast majority of cases, the judge is based on the expert report (which is why the opinion of the nominee). The protection of copyright was originally adopted by the EU Directive No. 91/250 of 14 May 1991 introduced into French law by Act No. 94-361 of 10 May 1994 which states in Article 1 that the protection by copyright applies to computer programs, including the preparatory design material. However, all that attractive to the software can not be protected: the ideas and principles which underlie any element whatsoever of a computer program, including those that underlie its interfaces, not are not protected by copyright.

In this respect, a key question is to determine what is meant by the term "preparatory design material". This preparatory work leading to the design development of the program, provided they are likely to enable the realization of a computer program at a later stage.

As a result a draft of the computer program is protected if it advanced enough to contain the seeds of further developments of the software. It was considered that the software is protected only as a work computer. The services expected of the software requirements definition, the details provided in the development by the layman who wished to see develop software from a clear, if they can possibly be by themselves a work of the mind, not within the framework of Article L. 112-2-13 of the Code of intellectual property.

About the features of the software, the Supreme Court ruled in a decision dated December 13, 2005 (1), that they understood as "the implementation of the capacity of the latter to perform a specific task or achieve a specific result, "do not, as such, the protection of copyright if they represent only an idea. The same applies to the classification of the data processing folders / subfolders. Or in intellectual property, ideas are free range (not copyrightable).