Software patent application or software copyright protection application?

Software patent application or software copyright protection application? The difference between software patent application and software copyright protection Many software enterprises will face a problem when applying for software protection after software development: whether to apply for software patent or software copyright protection? Software copyright application comes first: different protection principles. Software copyright is automatically generated after the completion of software creation, and it is also a voluntary registration of software copyright. The purpose of registration is to reflect the effectiveness of notarization, mainly to declare the ownership of copyright, and also to make the evidence of subsequent rights protection more powerful. Software patents must apply to the patent office for protection. Second, the materials submitted by different software copyright applications are source code and user's operation manual, so software copyright protection is the form of expression, not the idea. In this way, it is possible for competitors to study your software and then change the programming language to achieve the same result, but because the code is different, it does not infringe copyright. The software patent describes the design idea of the software at the time of application (note that it must be expressed in the form of technical scheme, or preferably combined with hardware), including the content of software flow chart, rather than mainly explaining which programming language is used to realize it. Once authorized, anyone who adopts the design idea or scheme of software patent may constitute infringement. Third, the application rate is different. Software copyright registration generally does not require substantive examination. As long as the materials submitted during the formal examination meet the requirements and do not violate the provisions of the copyright law, rights can be obtained, and the registration rate is extremely high. Software patents need formal examination and actual examination. Formal examination is mainly to examine whether the patented materials meet the application requirements. After the formal examination is passed, it will be made public, and then it will enter the substantive examination to examine whether the patent meets the requirements of the patent law, which must meet many requirements such as novelty, creativity and practicality. Generally, pure software patents are not easy to obtain rights, and the combination of software and hardware will improve the authorization rate, but the pass rate is still not high on the whole.