There are two categories of intellectual property. The first one is composed of writing, music, and film, which are covered by copyright. Patents cover inventions and innovations (Bassinger 24-28). These two categories have safely covered many kinds of work, with little or no conflict for years. For example, Susan Willis desc

Since the current copyright laws regarding the protection of intellectual material cannot effectively protect software, they are either too weak or too strict; for that reason, we need a new category of protection. "The perfect patent law would most likely last for 10 years and would be renewable" (Del Guercio 22-24). The deadline of a patent material should be long enough to protect a program for as long as it is still useful, and allow for sequels and new versions. It would also have to allow for others to make similar software, keeping the industry competitive; but it would have to protect against others copying portions of the software.

As shown above, there are many problems could be caused by the shortages of current copyright and patent laws. Currently, software copying is generally considered a copy of the original code such as when a backup of software is created as well as when people load a program into their computer¡Xa copy of that program will go into their computer's memory. While the copy does not stay indefinitely, it does stay long enough to perform a certain task, and can be looked upon as a form of software piracy (NacCracken 25). BBS (Bulletin Board Systems) are small online services run by individual system operators, who are legally considered responsible for all the files that are available on their system (Elkin-Koren 1). At first this seems like an obvious duty, ; however, if people have ever run a BBS before, they would know that maintaining their Web site and knowing what is on the computer is difficult. Sega Ltd., maker of the Sega Genesis and Sega GameGear, sued the Maphia BBS for making Sega Genesis ROMs publicly available in a download section. This section was a type of "digital rental," which enables public downloads, and the downloaded software is required to be deleted after a short period of time from 24 to 48 hours. Unfortunately, Maphia BBS did not have a disclaimer stating that the files must be deleted after a trial of period. Thus, Sega was able to sue Maphia BBS for this negligence; because without the disclaimer, there was no proof that they were not using this download system for monetary purposes. Of course, it could be used for that purpose even with the disclaimer. But the disclaimer does just that by renouncing the BBS operator of the responsibilities of that software copy (Elkin-Koren). Another example was the case between Playboy and the Frena BBS. The public file areas on the Frena BBS frequently contained image files, and more often, these images were adult image files. Playboy somehow found out that this BBS had some scanned photos from a Playboy magazine, and because they have the copyright to all their photos, they were able to sue the operator of the Frena BBS. The operator had no idea that there were any Playboy images on his system (Elkin-Koren). Although it is hard to distinguish the purpose of copying software, the end result is that companies that produce software could not develop.

Unfortunately, it is not that easy when dealing with such a complex matter such as computer software. For example, there is a program that can per

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