A US Appeals Court in Manhattan has issued a significant software copyright ruling in the suit brought by Computer Associates Inc against Altai Inc, by ruling that copyright extended only to the actual software code and not to the function that the code performs; in addition, it ruled that the behaviour of a program may be the function of hundreds of sub-modules, some of which may be so fundamental that they cannot be copyrighted; the decision upholds a ruling that each submodule in a program might be the fruit of a separate idea, and only the expression of the idea, not the idea itself, can be copyrighted.
