The Features of Legal Regulation of Software Rights Protection in Cross-border Trafficking

This master dissertation is aimed at forming an understanding of the system of legal protection of software, as well as comparing the mechanism of legal regulation of computer programs in the United States, the EU and Russia, identifying the main trends in this area of legislation and in the judicial practice of legal systems. The master dissertation consists of an introduction, three chapters, including nine paragraphs, a conclusion and a bibliography. The first Chapter of the dissertation includes a study of the nature of computer software and the mechanism of legal regulation of software in the United States, Europe and Russia, as well as a comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of ways of protection programs. The second Chapter discusses the exclusive rights of the author of a computer program, as well as exceptions to these rights that allow to use the program without violating copyright. In addition, the concept of illegal use of a computer program and the main approaches to the definition of violation are defined. The third Chapter of the dissertation describes the methods of transferring rights to computer programs and their features. In particular, the license agreement is singled out as the most popular method of copyright transfer, as well as its modern forms, from the point of view of the mechanism for concluding a contract. Based on the analysis, the following conclusions were made: firstly, from the ways of protection of computer programs - copyright, patent law and know-how regime, it is impossible to single out any universal one that would ideally plays the role of software protection; secondly, Russian legislation should provide a closed list of exclusive rights of the author, since this advantage becomes a significant disadvantage in the interpretation of illegal use of a computer program; thirdly, the lack of approaches developed by Russian judicial practice to the definition of illegal use of computer software restricts the legal regulation of software protection; fourthly, the system for transfering rights to computer software in Russian law looks more consistent than in the USA and EU legislation.