Copyright is the answer
to a major problem: how do you protect something creative that took a lot of
work to create, but very little to copy? That protection is important, because
few people will, or even can, create something that other people want to enjoy,
unless they have some reward at the end. This is especially true for software,
where making an absolutely perfect copy is easy
Writing software is as
creative as writing a book or movie. A lot of decisions and tradeoffs have to
be made, and today software takes millions, even billions, of dollars to put
together. As a society, we want to incentivize that work. Copyright provides the
solution.
Example: Company A
develops some new software. An engineer of company A makes a copy of the
software and starts a new company selling the same software. Most people would
consider such an action illegal.
Software is
copyrighted because it represents the intellectual property of its creator, so
it needs to be protected from being copied.
