A new look at software plagiarism investigation and copyright infringement

In the context of detecting possible copyright infringement, finding a correlation between the source code files for two different programs does not necessarily mean that illicit behavior occurred. Ideas, concepts, facts, processes and methods are not in themselves protected by copyright law. Therefore, not everything in software is subject to copyright or patent protection. It is possible to write software that is not protected by either. Expert opinion may be needed in court in order to determine whether an intellectual property infringement has occurred or not. This may involve a comparison of the source code. This basic legal retirement is explicitly the core of the case. The main contribution of this paper is the suggestion of a framework for understanding of the legal consequences of similarity in software code. Because comparing two works of software is not as simple as a line-by-line comparison.