State Policies on Piracy and Hacking

75 billion that year.2 nearly of this piracy is due to employees of companies either copying the bundle bought by the company or bringing in copied software for single-valued function in their jobs.3 An increasing amount of piracy is conducted through cloistered calculator "bulletin boards" where a wide variety of software is sold, traded, or given away. And much of this piracy is being conducted by overseas interests, both companies and individuals.4

Software is protected mostly by the Copyright trifle of 1976, which protects "original works of authorship unflinching in any tangible medium of expression . . . from which they give the axe be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, either directly or with the aid of a machine or device."5 The 1980 Amendments to the Act classified computer programs as "literary works."6 However, right of first publication protection of computer programs has eternally been problematic. Copyright protection has always been available only for a work's "expression" and not its " stem;" determining the exact point at which an " deification" is copyrightable as an "expression" is very difficult when the work is a computer program. While a computer program is first created as a series of written commands, its practical value lays in the accomplishment of its intended function, which some have said is the "ideal" of the program.7 Others have said that this characterization is too simplistic.8 In 1992, the back Circuit Court of Appeals formul

U.S. Congress, map of Technology Assessment. (1992, May). Finding a balance: computer software, noetic property, and the challenge of technological change, OTA-TCT-527. Washington D.C. : U.S. Government Printing Office.

1Wasch, onward the SPA Comes Knocking..., Computerworld, July 29, 1991, at 80.

ated a examine to be apply to computer software in order to determine whether its copyright has been infringed upon. First, an "abstractions" test is applied to see if the program is copyrightable. First joint by Judge Learned Hand in 1930, the abstractions test looks at the layers of "abstractions" upon which the components of a program are constructed; at some point in this series of abstractions the succeeding abstractions are no longer protected for they consist of the "ideal' of the work.9 The second part of the test, the sequent filtering method, screens the program's components at apiece level of abstraction to determine the copyrightability of each of these components. Finally, the comparison part of the test compares the components which are protected with the applicable components of the copied program to determine whether infringement has occurred.10

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