Technological Poetry: The Interface between Copyrights and Patents for Software

For historical reasons, there is an overlap between patent coverage for software as a technology and copyright coverage for software as a literary work. Each of these forms of protection for software has a proper role and should be allowed to coexist. Through common law evolution in case law and patent grants by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, patents have become the way to protect new and nonobvious functional concepts of software. Therefore, courts may be less willing to expand the scope of protected expression of copyrights to protect the functional aspects of software