Copyright law and computer programs

Drawing on American federal court rulings, this study looks at how software copyright disputes were argued and decided. Its main lens is Anthony Giddens' structuration theory, which the author applies to law for the first time in a systematic, empirical way. Earlier scholarship tended to treat law as autonomous, objective and neutral. Even work that examined social forces usually concentrated on economic or political causes.

The author organizes the analysis around three elements: the author, the work, and the use. The study traces how the parties' conflicts appear in their courtroom communication, and how their strategic choices reshape the legal environment that copyright operates in. The central question is how copyright law, which grew out of the age of print, should handle computer programs as a new form of creative work.

The findings challenge the common claim that modern copyright mainly serves rights holders at the expense of creators. In the legal arguments, the clearer divide was between those who develop software and those who do not. The idea of authorship changed over time but stayed at the heart of the debate, while the idea of use, despite the importance of users, had little role in the reasoning. Whether a party was a developer emerged as the single most influential factor, and a party that convincingly presented itself as a developer was more likely to win. The book argues that judges responded to the legitimacy a party built through communication more than to its actual character, and it shows how this process both reproduced and altered the structure of copyright law.