Something few non-lawyers understand is that to actually protect your code, works of art, ... you have to publish them!

The (temporary) protection you get from copyright law, patent law, trademarks, ... is given in trade for the author making their works, inventions, ... public and thus adding to the state of the art.

There are even some legal systems (most notably under European Union Law) that deny any protection at all for works which could have applied for specific protection (such as patents or design protection) but failed to do so.

So if you want to make sure, you get adequate protection go and see your friendly lawyer!

Of course some other legal systems (such as the US) make it a criminal offence to break any copy-protection or code-scheme. So hide your perl-code behind a simple source filter and send the decoders/re-engineers to jail, but don't hope that other legal systems will accept this.

CountZero

"If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler." - Conway's Law

In reply to Re: How can you protect your Perl Mods/Hacks? by CountZero
in thread How can you protect your Perl Mods/Hacks? by Anonymous Monk

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.